Following my previous examples of customer hindrance (the opposite of customer service) at play, here are a couple more from the last few days.
Alliance & Leicester Bank
I queued for over 20 minutes to pay some cheques into my account. As ever, only one cashier was working with customers, even though I counted at least six staff in the branch.
After queuing (relatively) patiently, it was my turn. “Oh dear,” said the cashier, “We can’t pay in more than 5 cheques at the counter. You should do this at the machine.”
Before I had time to answer, one of the previously invisible members of staff appeared and repeated this advice. “You can’t pay in more than five cheques at the desk you know. You should use the machine.”
Just as I was about to explode, she took the cheques off me and said, “Oh, give them here. I’ll do them at this machine.”
What is it about banks and customer hindrance? Why do the people who are supposedly providing service do everything in their power to make it as difficult as possible for you? And what does their attitude and behaviour say about the quality of their management?
East Coast Trains
East Coast trains run many of the train services connecting London with Edinburgh, Newcastle and Leeds. I join the service at Newark, and over the past year they have added automatic barriers for passengers to gain access to and egress from the platforms.
There is only one problem: as often as not, the barriers don’t work. As a result, there are usually a couple of members of staff on hand to either help passengers put their tickets into the machine properly, or simply swipe people through.
This means that the company has added operational cost, with the new equipment, but has not been able to reduced its people costs. In short, it has been an expensive way of making the queues of people trying to get on and off the platform longer.
If East Coast management’s goal is customer hindrance, I’m sure that I could help them achieve its objective in a far more cost-effective way!
© Stuart Cross 2010. All rights reserved.
If Customer Hinderance was an Olympic sport, the Alliance & Leicester would have a gold medal. Let me bore you with this story….
I paid in 7 cheques (£4,700) at the Post Office. When the cheques did not appear, I had to keep ringing A&L to ask them to look for them! They said that they didn’t know (care?) what had happened to the cheques, and said that they could not put a trace on them until they had been missing for 7 working days. I had to be VERY insistent that someone look for the cheques. They were eventually found, but was then told it would take a further 4 days for the cheques to clear. Resulting in payment being delayed to my account, through no fault of mine!
In the meantime, I had some more cheques to pay in. Feeling that I cant rely on the Post Office route, went to a branch to use the machine. Got to the branch only to find the machine was out of order. I asked the cashier if I could pay them in over the counter. No other customers in the branch, so I wasn’t adding to any queues! When she found out that the cheques were for a business account, I was told that she couldn’t do it as my card “wouldn’t be recognised’. At this point I was feeling very annoyed and looking at a sign claiming they “would like my visit to be outstanding”, well it certainly was, in terms of outstandingly poor service.
It was only when I explained that I was feeling rather annoyed, that the cashier decided that she would try and pay in the cheques for me. Guess what, she was able to pay the cheques in.
I had contact with 5 members of staff, they were all polite, but not helpful. In fact no one was willing to help until I started getting annoyed!
Thanks Angela. The interesting thing about my experience at A&L was that even though there were members of staff in the branch, none of them took the initiative to manage the queue, engage the customers or seek to help. The word ’empowerment’ often gets a bad rap from business writers, but nobody was willing to step up to the plate. And that is a management issue.
I thought Indian banks, telecoms and public sector organizations have a monopoly in customer hindrance. May be we inherited from our colonial cousins.
Joseph, I’m sure every country has its examples – in both the public and private sectors. And in every case, it is a failure of management.
I thought I would up date you on my experience of Alliance & Leicester (now calling themselves Santander). I am not really one for writing letters of complaint, my life is just too busy! But I did send an email to the chief executive, Antonio Horta-Osorio about my experience, with a link to your blog. A month has passed and I have received a response. What a disappointment! My email had been passed to someone in the complaints department. They either did not understand my complaint or (more likely) didn’t bother to read the letter, and just sent me some standard ‘cut and paste’ job of an apology, and then credited my account with £30 to buy my silence. Does Santander want me to take my business elsewhere? Well, I can feel another letter of complaint coming on….
Angela, the problem for us, as bank customers, is that our relationship with them is quite ‘sticky’. It’s a big hassle to change banks and so we have to be really upset to make that move. My suspicion is that banks’ poor customer service at the front line is based on their recognition of this position. Most of us just grumble under our breath, but don’t really do anything about it.