Bank on this: you’re losing customers

THE modern style of business is most definitely not for us of the older generation.

For the past week, I have been trying to contact somebody from customer services at a very large bank.

E-mails are ignored, and nobody in the banking world seems capable of using a telephone, even when the number is supplied with the e-mail address. I have even been to the head office, only to be told by the receptionist that there is no customer service there. How, then, does one advise them that their service is deplorable?

Modern bankers want everybody to use the internet, but my bank manager is incapable of explaining to me how my laptop will dispense R10 000 in cash when I require cash. I certainly have no desire to withdraw it in a public place.

Waiting in the teller section of the bank requires the patience of Job, because the one (yes, one) teller on duty during the morning takes more than 20 minutes to serve one client. Thus, as No 5 in the queue, I will be required to wait over an hour before being served and, as a disabled person, I can find no seat on which to rest my weary bones.

As a retired person, I have volunteered to manage our local bowls club. I am required to deliver money to the bank and deposit the cash in a machine in a space open to the public. Has it never dawned on the bank that the villains of this world will eventually get wise as to who deposits cash on a regular basis, and these people will become targets?

To obtain change to run our small business, we are required to notify the branch of our requirements, yet it is never ready on arrival there.

Should there be anybody in the banking business capable of reading a dictionary, or checking on Google, they will discover that the definition of a teller is “a bank employee who collects from and pays out money to bank clients”.

I presume their slogan, “How can we help you?”, is referring to the machines as “we”.

I wonder how long it will take the bank to understand why its client has become an ex-client. — Tom Lambe, Johannesburg