‘ROYAL Bank of Scotland (owners of NatWest) have announced pretax profits rose 14 per cent to £3.7 billion in the first six months of this year (2005)’
I give you this statement after just fielding a telephone call from one of NatWests (O joy, Word does not like ‘NatWests’ and the spell check has offered me ‘Nitwits’ instead, you can guess the tone of this blog right from the off) Customer Service Manager who broke the good news to me that they would not be charging me a further £56 pounds on top of the £28 that they have already charged me.
My crime, my account went £1 and 06p overdrawn. Yes that right, I’ll spell it out I went One Pound and six pence overdrawn whilst I was away on holiday in Ukraine. (For American readers that’s about $2) Heinous isn’t it. I am such a spendaholic me, spend spend spend with no thought to how the bank will cope, what with their £3.7 billion profits and all.
And pray tell me, who else is fed up of being patronised by 20 year old ‘Customer Service Officers who tell you that you shouldn’t have ‘overspent’ and that I should have ‘managed my account so that I would not have gone overdrawn’. The fact that I actually didn’t go overdrawn on purpose but the vagaries of the exchange rates and the fees charged for using your ATM card abroad actually slipped me over into the disastrous sum of £1 and 6p!
That the 20 years old financial wizard in front of me at the bank couldn’t comprehend this and just kept patronising me and repeating that ‘the banks terms and conditions states…’ like some sort of lunatic automation didn’t help my mood one iota, especially when they pointed out that the combined charges for my £1 error would in fact be £84!
Then like all good female customer service operators everywhere she upgraded her attack , from the customer is a simple imbecile from whom we can extort money just by stating terms and conditions to he’s an aggressive male whose language and behaviour has become inappropriate so we will terminate the session. (I admit that I was aggrieved and accused the female of patronising me, but I did not shout or swear or make any moves that could be construed as aggressive its just she had no where else to go with such a dead end argument and I was not going to just roll over and give her the money.)
So the Customer Service Manager marches in all smiles and conciliatory language, like the snake in the Jungle Book but without the eyes. She also attempts to patronise me by ‘just pointing out the rules and regulations of ‘un-permitted borrowing’. But it wasn’t un-permitted borrowing, it was just £1, due to me being on holiday and the exchange rate changes. Plus, as I told her as I had been banking since I was about 16 and was now quite old, I actually did understand how banks worked without her giving me the potted Janet and John version specially written for imbeciles. But my point was that a fee of £84 for a small mistake of £1 was nowhere near the realms of fair or good business practise. – She didn’t agree.
And we had to agree to disagree, because apparently, while she would have been very happy to have sold me the financial services provided by the bank, such as Mortgage’s, Insurances, Loans and so on probably up to and beyond the value of £250,000 there was nobody, yes NOBODY not even the Manager, in the Bank who could authorise stopping the said £84 charge. Isn’t that remarkable?
A special request had to be presented to some office somewhere or other up country, where probably some VERY IMPORTANT person would discuss and consider the request by the Customer Service Manager to write off the said £84 fee. Which of course they haven’t done, they still feel the need to slap me on the wrist, admonish me to the tune of £28 while at the same time pretending to have done me a favour by writing off the further £56 fee and explaining it to me again as if I am a two year old, all for the sake of me being £1 06p overdrawn. I will attempt to get my £28 back too!
Remarkable!
By way of an almost instantanious update I was so incensed at what I wrote, I called Natwets complaint line (NatWest - 0800 50 50 50) and the very nice man on the other end of the phone gave me my £28 pounds back too - isn't NatWest a wonderful bank, hey.....
(Oy who muttered hypocrite in the back there?)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment