There was a loud shriek from the lady who occupies the desk next to mine as she was opening the incoming post the other day. “Oh no”, she yelled, and the whole office fell silent, waiting on and wondering what was coming next. What would have provoked such a reaction out of nowhere? “Oh no, they’ve taken my George (not his real name) away.”

Explain please! We had received a letter from our bankers telling us that we were no longer entitled to a dedicated bank manager. I won’t name the bank, but it’s the same one that closed the branch near our office at the start of the year.

Relying on call centres to give the same service as a dedicated account manager

Instead of a nominated person responsible for providing a service to us, we now have to ring into a call centre and hope that we will be met with someone who can learn enough about our business in thirty seconds flat to provide us with a standard of service that a long standing customer might expect.

In many ways, we are no ordinary customer. On relevant occasions, we introduce our clients to them and, until now, we have spoken highly of the standard of service that George provided. We operate multiple bank accounts in providing our own service to clients, often needing prompt assistance with opening or amending accounts or handling queries on transactions.

We won’t be able to do any of that in the future and will face a risk that our own service standards, in which we take great pride, will suffer as a result of the bank’s falling service standards. It’s bad enough that we no longer have access to counter services following the branch closure. It’s downright unhelpful to lose our dedicated manager.

The lady in our office was right with her exclamation. It’s yet another example of big business putting the demands of their share-holders in front of service to customers.