Cut through the ‘phone maze’

ON behalf of a reader last week, I spent a frustrating 90 minutes attempting to persuade NatWest Bank to give me an email address so I could directly contact its complaints department.

The process of negotiating a route through the telephone complaints system maze was tortuous.

It seemed that no matter which combination of numbers I pressed, I got nowhere.

I wasn’t a customer, I didn’t want to be one. I didn’t have a customer reference number and I didn’t want to set up a direct debit.

I wanted to explain the problem. I just wanted to speak to a real person who had the power and savvy to deal with a non-standard complaint. It was greatly annoying. We’ve all experienced this from banks, power companies and just about every sort of company. That’s wrong. Customers are the life blood of every business. They would go bust without us. We accept it too easily. That’s wrong. Companies are set up to handle their complaints as cheaply as possible.

They keep us in queues, and blithely say they are “experiencing a high volume of calls”, as if it is somehow our fault they haven’t employed enough staff to deal with their customers. We get frustrated and bored and eventually we hang up. That’s wrong. We should all, when we DO get through to a human, complain bitterly that we will not accept being held in a queue of callers, after picking our way through several menus that tell us to “press 4 if we want to hear a recorded message on how the EU vote might affect the company”.

Complaints departments collate figures on the calls they get. If one person says they’re sick of the phone maze, they are ignored. If 100,000 say they want to transfer their business to a company that actually answers its phones, then they will listen.

Tell us your record number of calls or amount of minutes spent in a hold queue. Tell us how many “press 2 if you want…” menus you’ve been through. Let’s name and shame the worst. Your letter or email doesn’t have to be long, just tell us which company you were trying to contact, how long it took to negotiate the phone maze and how long you were on hold.

Write to Raw Deal Phone Maze, The Sunday Post, 80 Kingsway East, Dundee, DD4 8SL or email rawdeal@ sundaypost.com making your subject

“phone maze”.