I have been with First Direct since 1992 but an incident today has made me reconsider.
I set up a new payment to pay some money into a new savings account with the Nationwide. As always - I setup the bill payment and made a small £100 transfer to check that the money arrived safely. I then made a second payment at 4pm for a larger amount and that is where the First Direct Fraud team kicked in and boy, did they make a total mess of it all.
Initially I got a "random" call at 8pm (remember this is some 4 hours after my payment should have been made) from someone who I just could not understand - I could hear lots of other talking in the background so knew this was a call from a call centre. I did not link this call with my payment from First Direct in any way. I am not a racist person in any way shape or form and never normally have issues with accents or dialects but this man sounded like one of those typical scam callers that most of us simply hang up on (you know - the type telling you that your electricity needs to change over or telling you they are from BT and your broadband is not working right). He was so bad that I did not even discern the words "First Direct" from his mouth. I did the sensible thing and simply hung up the phone. I thought no more of it.
Then about 15 minutes later I got an SMS telling me that a payment is on hold and to call First Direct.
I called the regular number from the debit card (and not the one in the SMS message as this may also have been a scammer). After about 15 minutes of conversation with the man on the other end I got to the point where the payment was unblocked and was assured it would go through fine. I asked him to report to his management the fact that I could not understand the caller on the first call and that this was not really acceptable.
15 minutes later I checked my account online and could see the payment had debited my account.
A few minutes after that I got another SMS telling me that a payment had been reveresed because "we did not hear from you regarding a potential fraudulent payment"
Called the bank in the morning and got through to the normal First Direct banking team. Very helpful and concise and clear as always but. I was already in a bit of a mood about the whole debarcle. I suggested to her that the man in the fraud team call centre had not been competent in his job. I also explained that if First Direct are going to call people at 8pm at night (I actually tried to make the payment at 4pm!!) then they need to:
1. Be a bit quicker. 4 hours later is not use at all.
2. Make sure that the people in the fraud team can speak good enough english to be understandable. I get that many companies use offshore call centres these days. I deal with any of them on a daily basis and rarely have issues at all. What was different here that it is clear that First Direct are doing this on the cheap and not investing enough resources/money into using front line call handlers that can speak good enough english to be readily understandable by the UK market they are serving.
3. When a call is made to the Fraud Team then there should be a reasonable expectation that the person dealing with the matter can deal with it in a competent way. To tell a customer that it is all sorted and then to reverse the payment and send me an SMS saying that I did not bother calling them is unforgivable. Again, Done on the cheap.
Please First Direct, what has happened to you? I have been with you since the very first week you opened (around 30 years) and this is the worst interraction yet. Get rid of the indian fraud call centre and give the job back to the excellent UK staff. It is those UK staff that built your good reputation for customer services and it is the Indial Fraud Call Centre that will ultimately damage it. You seem to rely on your previous good customer services ratings and I can assure you that these are going to be dropping very rapidly if you don't have a rethink.
I explained to the UK person on the phone that this should be raised as a complaint but she was not able to do this personally - Why?? Why can you not click a button and send the recording of the call to the complaints team rather than expect the poor frustrated customer to wait in a queue (at my expense) and then spend another 15 minutes relaying the same story that you have just been told. It makes no sense?? She offered to put me through to the complaints team (and I appreciate that she was very good and did everyting in her power/gift as well as anyone could hope for, but in all honesty I could not be bothered to waste more of my life for what will end up being a poxy £10 or £100 "goodwill" payment to try and keep me sweet and not actually change in the situation.
I rather preferred to vent my frustration here in the hope that it actually makes them lose a bit of business and thus a rethink!! It is all very well offering money to new customers but think about it for a minute. If they were that good in the first place why would they need to do that? As for these surveys about customer service ratings - well I have never been asked to complete one in all my years with MSE.
Please understand that, in this day-and-age of scam callers and online fraud, the perople you use for fraud protection need to be at the top of their game, your best and most competent staff. Not the cheapest "bottom of the pile" staff. Wary people will simply hang up the phone if they get a call from a person that they can barely understand. No-one in their right mind would think for a minute that First Direct would employ such a person for such an important task.
It must be totally soul destroying for the poor call centre staff too. It is unfair to put a pesron in that position - you are setting them up to fail and opening them up for abuse on the phone from some less kind people. The UK call staff then also have to take the wrath of the customer to try and put right the mess and it can't be much fun for them either. They should also be empowered to write up and forward on a customer complaint.
Anyone who is tempted by First Direct - please believe me (and I know from 30 years of being a customer) that they aint what they used to be. They are on a downwards trajectory on the customer services front and their anti-fraud team can (as I have proven) sometimes not be as competent as you should expect from an organisation like First Direct.
