Banks driving us to distraction

In last week’s Mail, Jenni Murray went to war on those maddening automated tills in supermarkets. Today we turn our fire on ...

DISPLAYED on the wall outside one of Barclays’ recently refurbished branches is a message to customers. ‘We’re building tomorrow’s bank. One that gives you greater choice, access and freedom in the way you bank. Tell us what you’d like next.’

When I arrived at the branch in Holborn, London, shortly before lunchtime this week, one customer was making her feelings abundantly clear.

‘I hate it, I hate it, I hate it,’ the well-spoken, middle-aged woman shouted as she stormed out of the building via its automatic glass doors.

When I caught up with her and asked what had upset her so much, she quickly explained.

‘All I wanted to do was take some money out and pay some money in,’ she said, declining to give her name, but saying she works in the legal profession. ‘Quite simple. But I ended up having to use two different machines. When I go to my bank, all I want to do is see someone who can deal with whatever it is I want. Is that too much to ask?’

She was talking about the rash of machines on the walls inside hundreds of bank branches across the country. They can be used to take out money — as with a normal ATM — but also to pay in cheques and cash, pay bills, manage direct debits and bank transfers, make payments and view transactions.

But are they, as the banks claim, a ‘quick, easy and reliable’ way to do business?

Not necessarily, judging by a scene similar to the one in Holborn that unfolded this week at the Barclays branch in Surbiton, south-west London, a genteel suburban area where customers were becoming increasingly irate. The reason? Instead of a line of counter staff, they were faced with an impersonal wall of computers.

When the Mail visited, there was just one bank employee behind a desk to serve a lengthening queue of at least ten people.

Few of them seemed inclined to try their luck on the computer screens — not least because they had watched with grim fascination a man trying to pay in a bundle of cheques.

He was complaining loudly that the machine had failed to process one of his cheques, but had swallowed it anyway. A single member of staff armed with an iPad is supposed to be on hand to help a branch full of customers deal with the computer terminals, but she was nowhere to be seen.

When she appeared from behind a locked door, she was met with simmering anger, and tartly informed by the man with the cheques that he’d be changing banks.

Meanwhile, the rest of the queue — several of them elderly — looked on with increasing irritation. One, pointing out that his local branch a couple of miles down the road had been closed down, started pacing around and, audibly using the F-word, said that he would quit Barclays, too.

The reason for this anger in the High Street is that around the country the banking landscape is going through a rapid transformation.

In the past decade, more than 1,900 branches have closed, reducing the total to an estimated 9,500. And every year more shut. The banks’ rationale? That more and more people are banking online, therefore keeping so many branches open is uneconomic.

Given that the Big Four banks — Lloyds, NatWest, Barclays and HSBC — recorded combined profits in excess of £12 billion last year, it isn’t an argument that goes down particularly well with customers.

Especially those, be they small business owners or older people without access to the latest technology, who rely on their local branch to deliver their day-to-day banking needs.

At the same time as closing the smaller branches, those that avoid the chop are undergoing radical makeovers. Out go the human cashiers — and in come the self-service machines.

Enter a newly refurbished bank and it resembles a cross between the foyer of a budget hotel — sofas, mood music and neon signage — and a casino. Everywhere you look there are lines of flashing machines.

As for the staff who remain, instead of dealing with actually cashing a cheque, they wander around clutching tablets and managing queues of baffled and suspicious customers.

And while those few staff members may be on hand to help for now, the fear is that it won’t be long before the human element disappears altogether.

Of course, the banks claim they are making the lives of their tech-savvy customers easier — a similar argument used to justify the rows of self-service checkout machines taking over supermarkets and shops.

But the reality is that for most customers, it is a deeply irritating and alienating revolution.

LAST week in the Mail, Jenni Murray launched our Bring Back Real Service campaign by revealing how a day of shopping at self-service tills in several leading shops and supermarkets had left her steaming mad.

She also worked out it had taken much longer than dealing with a real person at the checkout — and was far more soulless.

Today, we focus on how banks are pulling the same trick with exactly the same result: widespread despair.

We talked to customers from Southampton to Leeds attempting to undertake the most routine of transactions and heard a litany of complaints.

The trouble is, says Derek French of the Campaign for Community Banking Services, that the banks are determined not to listen.

‘This is being driven primarily by cost,’ he says. ‘They all want you to do as many transactions as possible yourself, whether you are doing it online or are doing it on a machine in the branch.

‘It means they need fewer staff, and so I think they will continue remorselessly down this route. They view it as some form of progress — irrespective of what customers are telling them.’

The rise of internet banking does mean people visit their local branch less often than they used to.

The British Bankers’ Association claims footfall is dropping by 10 per cent a year. But it’s more likely that the kind of people who do visit branches are the ones who don’t want to deal with computers.

BY ENCOURAGING their customers to complete everyday transactions via a machine, the banks hope that staff can concentrate instead on making money by selling profi t a bl e products, s uch as mortgages and insurance.

The trouble is that when ‘everyday’ transactions on machines don’t go smoothly, loyal customers quickly become frustrated and angry.

Take the branch of Barclays I visited in Holborn. Unveiled last year, it has all the features typical of a modern bank. For starters, there is no wall of reinforced glass dividing staff from customers. Instead, people are greeted in the foyer by a smiling member of staff standing beneath an illuminated halo that reads: ‘Can We Help?’

I tell the man I want to pay in a cheque and am directed to three giant machines at the far end of the room. To get there I pass another ten machines — five on each side — before joining a short queue.

There I notice, tucked in the corner and purposefully out of view, a single manned cashier’s desk. Of the three machines I am directed to, one is out of order. So I stand and wait for four minutes, while two women complete their automated transactions.

One of these involves paying in two cheques, something that would take a cashier a matter of seconds.

It is this wait that proves too much for the lady behind. She is on the point of storming out when she is persuaded to try another machine — and then has to use a second one when it won’t work. At that point, she departs in disgust.

When we speak, she says that something similar routinely happens whenever she visits the branch.

‘I am computer literate, but a lot of people aren’t,’ she says. ‘ And when they aren’t they hold up the queue.’

Next, I head to the City and the NatWest at Moorgate. The branch of this bank, part of Royal Bank of Scotland — which was rescued from near collapse in 2008 by £46 billion of taxpayers’ cash — has undergone a similar makeover: open plan, banks of machines and just two cashier’s desks.

At one of these, a customer is paying in thousands of pounds in cash, causing an eight-deep queue.

Outside, I chat to Chris Szeller, 59, managing director of an office cleaning services firm. Five months ago, his branch, which had three cashiers, closed, forcing him to travel to this

one. ‘I was just trying to withdraw some money f rom a company account,’ he says. ‘I don’t have a card for it. I had to wait 15 minutes. It is not quicker and it is not easier. It is not working.’

Across the country, there were similar complaints. At a re-fitted Barclays in Southampton, it took 41- year- old housewife Rachel Collins 45 minutes to pay in cash for her rent. ‘I queued up, then I was told I was in the wrong queue and had to join another one for a differ- ent machine,’ she said. ‘When I was asked how much I needed to pay in, they said I could not do that on the machines.

‘So, I had to queue up again. Eventually they took me upstairs to speak to a person, who then did it. It’s nonsense. My mum is 70 and she is terrified of coming to the bank because she has no idea how to use the machines.’

Also in the city centre was a branch of HSBC, complete with a row of eight machines for paying in cheques and notes, as well as transferring money. But when the Mail visited, all the chairs in the waiting area were occupied by customers wanting to speak to one of three cashiers — a wait of five to ten minutes.

‘Using the machines can be a bit of a pain because they do not always work perfectly,’ said Michael Roberts, 21. ‘When you talk to a person they know what they are doing.’

We went 150 miles north to Birmingham, and at the city centre Lloyds, queues for the cashiers easily outstripped those for the machines. (Lest we forget, last year Lloyds, which got a £20 billion bailout from the taxpayer in the 2008 financial crisis, said it was axeing 9,000 staff — a tenth of its workforce — as part of a £1 billion cost-cutting drive.)

‘I would rather talk to someone than go to these machines, but sadly more and more of them are appearing,’ said retired GP Denise Kinch, of Bartley Green, Birmingham.

At a city centre NatWest branch in Leeds, Lesley Horner, 58, was struggling to pay in some money.

‘ Sometimes t he self- service machines are fine, but other times they decide to chew up and spit out the cheques,’ she said.

Contacted by the Mail, the four banks insisted that while they remained focused on the needs of their customers, they were responding to changes in the way people want to use their bank.

But other i ndustry experts, such as David Buik, a market commentator for the investment firm Panmure Gordon, say they believe that banks are making a big mistake by reducing contact with their customers.

‘I doubt the banks could be lower i n customers’ s t anding and estimation as a result of the misselling of PPI and so on,’ he says.

AND the only way you are going to rebuild your credibility or your respect is by having ey e ball to eye ball contact with every one of your customers. It’s a service — and people are just not getting any service.’

As for the banks themselves, a spokesperson for the British Bankers Association said: ‘ High Street banks have invested millions in refurbishing their branches to install the latest technology to make them easy and accessible.

‘This is in response to increasing public demand to use technology to speed up their transactions in branches.

‘Branch staff are still an important part of this picture, providing customers with the choice to visit a counter or support customers in understanding the new technology in branches.’

But when there is a long queue for a counter that’s survived the cull, and a single assistant to help several customers trying to negotiate those infernal computers, the word ‘choice’ is probably not on everyone’s lips.

There are, however, several others with four letters that might be.