Just another day at the bank
My late father used to take a fairly robust attitude towards alleged corporate inefficiency, incompetence and/or poor practice which is why, whenever he came across a glaring example, he always contacted the head of the organisation concerned.
He justified this practice on the basis that – in the cause of improving its operation and therefore financial well-being – any chairman of any organisation worth its salt should/would welcome customer feedback, most particularly if it was negative.
In family folklore the most famous occasion he did this was when, late in his career, he was flying back first class from Australia to London.
Afterwards he contacted the chairman of an organisation to tell him that he has sat behind two of its (to him) young executives who had spent much of the flight triumphantly discussing the details of some financial deal they had just completed. A fortnight later he received a call from said chairman thanking him for his contact and reporting that they had both been sacked.
Which brings me to my experience yesterday at the Richmond, Surrey, branch of Nat West Bank.
The UK banking sector – Nat West included – has spent the last fifteen years radically changing the way it deals with its customers.
In the cause of increased efficiency many local high street branches have been shut – and jobs lost.
Online banking has been actively encouraged.
Hundreds of ATMs (cashpoint machines) also have been abandoned, thereby leaving hundreds of thousands if not millions of ordinary, common-or-garden customers both scrabbling around trying to ‘get seen’, or even simply gain access to their money when they want it, and generally bemoaning ‘the good old days’ when your personal bank manager was always available for a chat and more often than not keen to assist with any issues you might have.
No doubt like many others – and not just in Nat West – the Richmond branch of Nat West has recently changed its set-up.
Where previously customers simply queued their turn at a counter manned by two or three members of staff and ‘did their thing’, now the counter is staffed by a single person (two if you are very lucky) and deals only with cash transactions.
If you wish to do anything ‘complex’, e.g. check your bank statements, transfer money direct or discuss opening or closing an account, you now have to queue to be seen at a standing-only ‘station’ in the centre of the room manned by a single member of staff.
In addition, along a side-wall, there are four ATM-like machines where – as an alternative to joining the now inevitably lengthy queue at the counter – if you simply want to pay-in a cheque, check your bank balance and/or take money out – it’s a case of do-it-yourself.
If whilst doing that you hit a snag – or don’t understand what’s going on – if you want assistance, you have to join wither the queue to the counter or the one at the station in the centre of the room.
Fast-forward to yesterday, when I needed to see a member of staff – preferably one at managerial level – for some advice.
Doing so at the counter was clearly ‘out’ because I wasn’t doing a ‘cash transaction’. I couldn’t achieve what I required by pressing buttons on an ATM machine. Thus my only option was to queue to see the person at the station in the centre of the room.
I therefore placed myself behind a male customer who was standing at the station, which was unmanned – I presumed this was because the staffer concerned had gone ‘backstage’ to check or deal with something on behalf of said customer.
Subsequently I found that I was not ‘second’ in the queue because there was a lady sitting in a chair behind me who enjoyed that status but had got bored standing and so retired there to sit.
After five or six minutes sitting beside and chatting to her I suggested I ask for further information and walked to the customer at the station.
It turned out he’d already been waiting then ten minutes … and no member of staff had come to even man the station in this time, or indeed deal with his issue.
The queue at the counter was lengthening by the minute. Another gent, turning away from the wall of ATMs, hearing my conversation, came over to offer the news “What’s more, none of their machines seem to be working!”
I kid you not – after another thirty-five minutes of queue-growing, disgruntled customers leaving the branch to spend their afternoon more productively and others, sitting on the chairs provided and/or standing, openly and loudly proclaiming their frustration and dissatisfaction – the customer at the station in the middle of the room was finally ‘seen’, but only after complaints had been made.
In summary, the new set-up at the high street branch in Richmond is a customer-disaster. Not a single person I spoke to yesterday regarded it as an improvement upon what went before – in fact, quite the opposite.
I certainly don’t blame the Nat West staff. Those who haven’t been ‘moved on’ or made redundant can only do their best with the situation they’ve been placed in.
I don’t even particularly single out Nat West – I’m sure that the story at most other high street UK banks is entirely similar as they fight for financial survival and market shares in difficult economic times.
I blame the banks’ boards or individual executives – and the highly-paid architects, designers, ‘policy wonks’, actuaries and/or marketing people who advised them – who came up with these lunatic concepts as to how to improve their business operations and customers interfaces and ultimately made the decisions to spend presumably hundreds of millions of pounds implementing them.
It’s not working, chaps!
Frankly, the board of Nat West (or should that be Royal Bank of Scotland whom I believe – according to Wikipedia – own Nat West?) would have far done better to go down the East of London and get some advice from any local trader on a proverbial whelk stall.
In summary:
A dose of straightforward common sense wouldn’t have harmed anyone …
