In the week before Christmas last year I was eager to log-in to my Internet bank to see how much I had been paid as I had recently been TUPE transferred and had been changed to monthly pay. I had been using the same log in details for about eight years without any problems but this time I managed to lock myself out of my account and had to call customer services and was told that a new PIN would have to be sent and that it would take approx seven to ten days to arrive. How inconvenient, I thought as I now could not do any banking except by the old fashioned way of using the telephone banking service, but there was nothing that I could do except wait for the new PIN to arrive and I knew that this would be delayed because of the Christmas holiday period.
The new PIN arrived in the first week in January and I rushed to my PC only to find that this new PIN was blocked and did not work, I then called customer services again and was told that I would have to have another PIN and would have to wait another seven to ten days. The second new PIN arrived about a week later and hey presto it worked and I was able to get in to my bank account.
The next pay day arrived for me in the last week in January and as it had been about six weeks since the last one because the previous one was bought forward a week due to the Christmas holiday period I was again eager to see my account and I managed to log in and out successfully about three times that day whilst I was working out my cash flow, however I did manage to somehow lock myself out again and had to call customer services again and I was told that I would now have to wait another seven to ten days for yet another new PIN to be sent. I was also told by the nice lady in customer services that following my banks take over by that very large Spanish bank, this was happening a lot to many of their customers.
I was getting quite a bit fed up and frustrated by this time as you could imagine and decided to do something about it and I looked on the the bank’s website and I found a complaints telephone number. It said that ‘the bank strives to keep their customer’s happy’ so I called this number and complained about two things, the first one being the number of times that I had been locked out of my account and the second was the cost of the phone calls that I had incurred to call the bank, at ten pence per minute this had added quite a tidy sum on to my phone bill.
The nice man in the complaints department that I spoke to promptly credited my account with the princely sum of fifty pounds, yes, you read that right FIFTY QUID and offered me either a bunch of flowers or a case of wine for the inconvenience, I will leave you to guess what I chose, so if you have ever had bad service and have been too scared or just too lazy to complain and thought that it would not be worth it, I would advise that you do as you could end up being quids in like me.
Just to let you know that I had three more new PIN’s sent to me before I could log in to my bank again but all is working ok now.

Simon
30 Jan 2011

Source: http://simon-b.org/it-pays-to-complain.php

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