Communication Breakdown

In the 1980s, while I was working at Midland Bank in Barking, if the telephone wasn't answered within three or four rings, one of the managers would bellow, "Telephone!" and the call would be picked up immediately. In those days customers could actually ring the bank branch where they held their account and speak to someone whom they had quite probably met face to face at the counter at some time or another. They might have had to call on a landline from their home, or work, or a call box, but aside from the occasions when the lines were engaged, the chances were good that within a few minutes of placing their call, the customer would have had whatever it was they were calling about dealt with.

Today, this seems positively quaint, because although the channels of communication have improved since the 1980s, with phone calls now possible from anywhere thanks to the ubiquitous mobile phone, and with other methods of contact such as online chat being introduced, actual communication has broken down and become poorer in my opinion. Instead of the customer calling their branch and speaking to someone who knew them, their business and their account as was the case thirty-odd years ago, customers now have to navigate interminable menu trees, and identify themselves by whatever method their bank employs before being able to talk to a call handler. In these days of identity theft, the need for a bank - or any other organisation - to be certain they are speaking to the right person is of paramount importance, of course. In the 1980s, methods of identifying customers who called were much more informal, and we would often do so simply because we recognised the voices of frequent callers, but I never heard of a case of someone calling and impersonating a customer. Although the phrase 'identity theft' seems to have first been coined in the 1960s, it wasn't even thought of as a problem until recently.

Having held on the phone for a period of time much greater than my manager back in the 1980s would have tolerated, today's bank customers will end up speaking to someone who is not only not in their branch, but are probably not even on the same continent. And the person at the other end of the line in whichever bank's call centre it is will never have spoken to the customer before, far less met them in person. Chances are, customer and bank staff will never speak to one another again. Which is just part of the problem. Who among us have not rung a bank, insurance company, or energy provider and having taken the name of the person at the other end of the line, and wanting to speak to them again, either because they have provided good service and we would like to have them help us again, or because we have a supplementary question, been thwarted in our attempts to contact that person and had to go through the disheartening business of explaining our problem once again, this time to someone else?

It seems that in many cases organisations are actively placing barriers between themselves and their customers. It isn't uncommon to head to a website, click on the Contact Us option and be presented with the options to email or use some sort of messaging facility, but find no telephone number. Amazon's website doesn't even have a Contact Us option that I can find on the home page, although it can be found - eventually - through their Help page, and if you want to speak to them, there is no number to call, just the option to ask them to call you. The impression is that they really, really, don't want to talk to you.

I had to use Fitbit's Live Chat facility a few months back, and as is the case on more than one occasion when I've used these sorts of services, I got the impression that I was chatting with a bot. While I am sure that this is fairly common these days, the experience was vaguely unnerving and not really very satisfactory. By the by, I have noticed that no matter how unhelpful or generally useless people (or bots) have been in a chat or telephone conversation, they invariably ask, "Is there anything else I can help you with today?" at the end of the conversation. I am often tempted to point out that they haven't helped me with my initial problem, so in answer to that question, probably not.

The barriers that organisations erect between themselves and their customers mean that many people, even when they have a complaint, simply give up and move on. The cynic in me says that this could easily be a deliberate policy that drives down complaint volumes and when an organisation's key performance indicators are published, low volumes of queries and complaints can be proudly cited as demonstrating how well the company is doing, even though this is not strictly the case.

In the last few months it has been my unfortunate experience to have to contact one particular bank, and various agencies such as the Royal Mail, Citizens Advice, Action Fraud, Trading Standards, and the police. I won't go into the reasons here, as the matter is ongoing, although I can say that this doesn't relate to something that has happened to me, but to someone else on whose behalf I have been acting. I have spent hours on the phone to people - mostly on hold - with a 90 minute wait to 101, the police's non-emergency line particularly frustrating, especially when at the end of it, I was told to contact Action Fraud. And no one, but no one ever calls back (with the honourable exception of the police, although even they needed some cajoling). Trying to obtain a simple letter from the bank took four phone calls over a period of six weeks, despite having been promised at least three times that it had been sent. The Royal Mail turned the simple task of delivering a special delivery letter into a complete farce, by mis-delivering the first one to the sender and not the addressee, and then taking weeks to return it once the addressee had refused to accept it, and that despite claiming that, had it been returned, we would have had it back by the time I had to have a long, and very unsatisfactory telephone conversation with them in an attempt to locate the missing letter.

According to Citizens Advice, Trading Standards do not, under any circumstances, provide feedback, and neither do Action Fraud. It seems that communication with these organisations is purely one way, so the public can have absolutely no confidence whatever that they are actually doing anything after a matter has been raised with them. The Times ran an expose of Action Fraud recently (August 2019), in which they revealed that "staff had been trained to mislead victims into thinking their cases would be investigated even though most were never looked at again," and this - together with the impression I got from speaking with the police that Action Fraud are not held in very high regard by them - reinforces my belief that organisations actively impede the public in their attempts to make complaints, or even to simply communicate with them.

Technology has moved on a-pace since my days at Midland Bank in Barking, but whereas it should have made communication between organisations and their customers easier, along with the resolution of complaints and queries, it seems that the reverse is actually true. From experience, it seems that the poor old customer is all too often on their own as the agencies they ought to be able to depend on are either indifferent to their problems or incompetent in dealing with them. The last thirty years might have seen progress, but not necessarily any improvement.