Here are the histories of two complaints and of very many weeks of trying to get satisfaction.
I went to my Bank’s local ATM for cash one Saturday morning last March. But for the purpose of this story imagine what follows occurred after banking hours the evening before a weekend Bank Holiday, that I was trying to buy something quite expensive in a late opening shop and that the Bank would not reopen before the following Tuesday.
Anyway, I went to the machine and tried to draw cash from my current account. The machine refused, brutally. I tried again; the result was the same. I knew I had a substantial credit balance so I asked for a statement. The statement indicated I was seven thousand pounds odd overdrawn.
When I returned home I trawled through all the various Bank telephone numbers I could find. Eventually I found a sympathetic ear but, alas, sympathy could not obtain me access to my own funds. Nor could I obtain any explanation.
I resumed telephoning early on Monday morning. It turned out that a very large cheque had been debited, erroneously, to my account sometime early the previous week. That cheque bore the same last three numbers as my own immediately preceding cheque debited properly to my account. Although I was assured by the central office dealing with this area that all had been rectified, when, some hours later, I again tried to get money from my local ATM it again refused. I was not pleased to be told that these things take time to pass from computer to computer.
Shortly afterwards I started to complain. Why should I not be able to get hold of my own money? Why could I not obtain an explanation? Describing the telephone conversations and exchanges of letters between March and July would be far too boring. It was only in July, having worked my way up the responsibility ladder that I received an admission that my bank has no systems that would sound a warning when an error of this sort occurs; and that they had no intention of changing arrangements as errors were rare. It is, perhaps, just as well for my state of mind that I did not receive the letter saying that I was overdrawn until after the ‘overdraft’ had been settled.
I suppose I should have asked for some compensation for my time and trouble but I did not and none was offered; indeed I suspect that had I not pointed out that I was at risk of being charged interest on the ‘overdraft’ I would indeed have been charged. My bank has a ‘direct’ facility. I was not at the time a ‘subscriber’ to it; but that would have made no difference, the bank admitted: no errors can be rectified over a holiday period. I have carried out a mini-survey of other banks; those that I approached admitted that they, too, could not rectify an error outside ordinary office hours. This may not be true of all deposit taking bodies but it might be worth checking before you offer your cash card in payment for that diamond bracelet for your loved one.
My second run-around concerned a personal pension fund that had come to term and was to be used to buy an annuity. That the fund was a very small one is only marginally relevant. The insurance company wrote to me telling me what the fund amounted to, what they were prepared to offer by way of different sorts of pensions and warning me that if I wanted to shop around for better offers I would have to get a move on. Unfortunately, they only gave me a little over three weeks to search, make up my mind, approach my trustee etc. and I was about to go abroad on holiday.
I grumbled to myself, thinking that searching the market would not only take time, but might not produce any great advantage. I thus decided that I would accept one of the company’s offers and dispose of the paper work. I had my holiday; I returned in good spirits; and I found that the company had written in my absence amending their offers in the light of information that I had given and which they had not bothered to seek before writing in the first place. The new correspondence not only misinformed me about necessary steps to conclude the business but also gave me only a very few days in which to do so.
I was somewhat irritated. But there was little I could do, practicably, but accept the amended offer - I was in no position to question what the company told me about Inland Revenue rules - and say I was going to take the matter further. The sad thing about all this is that I received no satisfactory response from people on the shop floor and their supervisors; they said they had followed the system, they were sorry about the mistakes etc. I had to demand that my complaints about inadequate customer care be put to senior management and to threaten that I would put them to the PIA Ombudsman.
Happily, that did produce results. The company acknowledged that the system was at fault and undertook to review their arrangements for keeping customers properly informed in good time etc. That was what I really wanted. When this appears in print I shall let them have a copy and offer them the chance of publicly saying that they have improved their customer care.
I did not, of course, get my option to search the market; that was water under the bridge on account of the Inland Revenue rules. But the company offered me a couple of hundred pounds as compensation, which I readily accepted.
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