NS&I customer service is so BAD.

Sailtheworld

apb123 said:

I have been trying to get my 16 year old daughter registered for premium bonds for 4 months now. NS&I have a strategy of ignoring all your letters, and making it practically impossible to get through on the phone. I was waiting 90 minutes (yes 90 minutes !) last week and managed to register a complaint with them..but since then silence...We are in this Kafkaesque situation where they ask for a witnessed signature, and we send a witnessed signature, then they ask for another one....repeat..repeat..

I have a new strategy now. We are going to write to them every day until they acknowledge the problem. I have printed of the same letter 30 times with dates over the next month...

Definitely worth the time and effort - you'll be up by the price of a Freddo in ten years or so.

EdGasketTheSecond

Thrugelmir said:

EdGasketTheSecond said:

NS&I are to stop sending premium bond prizes in the post and you have to supply bank details by registering online. My sister does not have a computer and wouldn't understand one, can't get out of the house due to poor health, and cant get through on the phone to NS&I. It is an intolerable situation and shameful for a government institution to have such poor service.

Must be a pain having to bank the cheques she receives then. 

That's not an issue as a friend does her banking.

Sailtheworld

EdGasketTheSecond said:

NS&I are to stop sending premium bond prizes in the post and you have to supply bank details by registering online. My sister does not have a computer and wouldn't understand one, can't get out of the house due to poor health, and cant get through on the phone to NS&I. It is an intolerable situation and shameful for a government institution to have such poor service.

Could you do it for her? Yes, it sounds like a PITA but at least NS&I is a government institution where dealing with them is entirely optional.

colsten

EdGasketTheSecond said:

Thrugelmir said:

EdGasketTheSecond said:

NS&I are to stop sending premium bond prizes in the post and you have to supply bank details by registering online. My sister does not have a computer and wouldn't understand one, can't get out of the house due to poor health, and cant get through on the phone to NS&I. It is an intolerable situation and shameful for a government institution to have such poor service.

Must be a pain having to bank the cheques she receives then. 

That's not an issue as a friend does her banking.

Why can't the friend, or you, help your sister with the one-off setting up of her PB account so that her wins get paid into her bank account? Or, if she doesn't want the friend / you to help her with it, or if neither of you is willing to help her with it, she can contact NS&I directly and give them her sort code and account number. That's really all that's needed. Everything else will work automatically.

If your sister wants to know a couple of days before the money lands in her current account whether she has 'won', then again, the friend, or you, can check her bondholder's number in the PB checker. All a lot less effort than getting a cheque to the bank, and the 'win' money is cleared a lot earlier. 

eskbanker

It must be said that it really wasn't a particularly bright idea to allow a largely self-inflicted perfect storm to brew up - NS&I have presumably been affected by the coronavirus in much the same way as everyone else, with the inevitable impact on service levels due to staff working from home, so they're probably blameless on that front.

However, when they found themselves leading the savings best buy rankings in the summer, that would clearly result in increased activity levels as savers flocked to them, but to then slash their rates to trigger a stampede in the opposite direction has again doubtless generated plenty of work.  Granted, much of that would have been driven by funding target changes though....

Withdrawing paper warrants in favour of online payments is an eminently sensible thing to do at some point, but to choose to implement this concurrently with all of the above doesn't seem a sensible plan, so it's not really surprising that communication channels are clogged and admin errors proliferate!