Dealing with banks and financial institutions – one of life’s great mysteries

Countless times I’ve hung up in frustration when I’ve called my bank. The automated voice on the end of the phone simply doesn’t seem to understand the urgency. ‘Your call is important to us’ – Yeah well obviously not that important because otherwise you would have answered the phone!!! Argh! Why do I waste my time? At one stage my attitude was let them call me when there was a problem. The thing is if your bank is calling you, you know you have a big problem.

If you do insist on calling the bank once the call gets answered you invariably get talking to someone who doesn’t like their job and has very little interest in your situation. Now some may find this a bit harsh but this has been my general experience. If you are already stressed about your financial situation the last thing you want is someone dealing with you in a cold and detached manner? Unfortunately that is almost exactly what you always get.

If you have a financial problem you want suggestions and solutions to it. You don’t want to talk to some one who sounds like a robot reading from a rehearsed script.

The reality of working in a call center for a bank

Many moons ago as a student I spent sometime working as a credit card salesperson for a large financial institution. The pay was poor and the conditions cramped and the work was awful. My job was to ring people and ask them if they wanted to buy additional insurance as part of their credit card package. It was cold calling at its worst and a very tough job at that. To be honest I didn’t last long. I could handle the rejection but I simply couldn’t handle the repetitiveness of reading from the same script over and over again. I almost always invariable ended up going off script and talking about things like football. As a result I would get reprimanded for not making enough calls per hour and not sticking to the script.

I did find it a very useful experience though. I gained a valuable insight into the workings of a financial institution’s call center and the things that customers who call looking for help can do to improve their chances of a successful call.

Okay so here are my top ten pieces of advice when it comes to dealing with financial institutions over the phone.

1. Mentally prepare yourself. What this means is have a clear idea in your mind of what to expect from the call and exactly what you want from the call. Don’t expect the person on the end of the phone to be your friend. Don’t expect a miracle solution to your problems. Do have a clear idea of what you deem to be a successful outcome to the call.

2. Have your paperwork, facts and figures prepared and to hand when you make the call. There is nothing more frustrating to someone working in a call center than someone who does not know their account details or who has to fumble about for the details of the payment they are querying.

3. If your call is answered by a person whose first language is not English then please be patient. More and more large banks and financial institutions are outsourcing their call centres to places like India and Poland to take advantage of the lower wage cost. The thing is these people are usually highly educated and often people are too quick to label them as stupid simply because English isn’t their first language. The best strategy is to be patient, speak slowly and clearly and treat them with respect. Remember an angry person in anyone’s language is still an angry person.

4. Take the full name of the person you’re dealing with. If you’re happy with them and have further queries you will want to call them back. This might seem obvious but how often have you rang the bank back only to forget the name of person or worse still you remember their first name as ‘Jane’ and then you are told that there is 8 women called ‘Jane’ working in the place. You have to realise that these call centers are huge with hundreds of employees working side by side. The staff turnover is usually quite high so the chances of you finding Jane again are slim if you do not know her second name. So the key is to get the full name of the person you are dealing with.

5. Related to number 4. If you are unhappy with the person you are dealing with simply call the bank again at a different time and explain your situation to someone different. Repeat this process until you are happy with the customer service rep that you are dealing with. Try to vary the times that you call. So if you called at 10am in the morning call back later in the evening. Hopefully this way the shift will have changed in the call center and you will have avoided the chance of getting the same person on the phone. If you do happen to get the same person on the phone simply hang up.

6. Keep calm. Dealing with financial problems can be emotionally draining. For a lot of people dealing with the bank can be an intimidating experience. It is easy to get frustrated and upset when you are kept on hold for 20 minutes only to be told that you are in the wrong. Keep calm. It will only make your interaction with the bank more awkward if you get the reputation for being a difficult customer.

7. Be persistent – resolve yourself to the fact that when dealing with your bank you are most likely in for the long haul. If you are having financial problems and need the co operation of your bank to help you solve those problems then your are going to have to be persistent. The pace of progression will be slow and you will meet with a lot of frustration but the key thing for you to be is persistent. You have to remember that you are dealing with a faceless monolith of an organisation that cares very little for you or your problems regardless of what they might say. The only solution to their inertia is the overwhelming persistence that you will bring to bear on them.

8. Anything that is agreed between you and the customer service rep. during the call have agreed in writing if possible. Ideally it would be great if you could get an email confirmation of everything that you agreed with the customer service rep. This will help avoid any confusion as to what needs to be done and who needs to do it. At the end of every call simply call back the facts to the customer service rep. Say something like this “okay, I just want to confirm what we just discussed. I need to do XY and Z and you are going to do AB and C…is that correct?” This will help clarify the situation.

9. Complete the tasks that you agreed to do with the Customer Service Rep. This shows that you mean business and that you are determined to solve the problem. If possible mark any documents that you send to the bank for the attention of the customer service rep. This should help speed up the process.

10. Patience my friend is a virtue or so the slogan of the banks and financial institutions that I’ve had to deal with should read. To understand why the process of dealing with the banks takes so long you have to try to imagine the size of the bank. Generally there are thousands of people working for the bank. There are hundreds of departments. With in these departments there are dozens of teams. Each team deals with something slightly different than the others. As a result when you have a query with the bank it has to be filtered through multiple layers of the organisation to find an answer then the answer has to be filtered back through the same layers to you. Generally the banks are well set up to cope with these queries but as you can imagine the sheer size and scale of the organisation can result in delays in getting a response to you.

Some banks and financial institutions are better than others when it comes to dealing with customer queries. What we as customers need to realise is that we have to prepare for our interactions with the banks. The more prepared we can be in terms of documents, facts and figures and more importantly attitude the more easy it will be for us to get what we want from them.

Related posts:

1. Is financial paperwork the bane of your life? It was for me.
2. In debt? Your banks don’t care about you