Heartbreak and hope in a Covid call centre

Bank helplines have become a lifeline for customers, as this dramatic diary reveals . . .

NORMALLY, Mark spends his working hours sitting among hundreds of colleagues in Santander’s busy Glasgow office. But, since lockdown started, he has instead been fielding calls from the bank’s customers at his home, in a makeshift one-man call centre.

The banking giant is receiving an unprecedented number of calls from customers worried about their finances.

It is 3pm and Mark has already taken around a dozen calls, but Santander’s coronavirus helpline shows no sign of abating. A woman rings.

‘I’m off work at the moment and they lost their dad just before Christmas,’ the caller says. ‘It’s all down to me. They’re quite expensive, these children. Well, they’re not children. They’re in their 20s.

‘My son is living with his girlfriend but my two daughters are with me. I’m due to go in for operations for health conditions. I’m on benefits. It’s a struggle.’

It’s a lot to take in. Mark learns that the daughters are furloughed care workers. The mother’s income is limited to Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment, she has racked up overdraft charges in each of the first three months of the year and can’t pay her bills.

The fix is simple, but effective. Mark refunds the most recent overdraft charge and arranges a £300 overdraft, waiving fees until July 9.

‘You could hear the relief in her voice,’ Mark says. ‘The fees might not be huge, but they are just so glad there is someone on the other end of the line.’

The call, which lasted 18 minutes, is one of around 400 that the bank’s coronavirus call handlers answer that day. That’s down from a peak of more than 1,000 in the first week after lockdown began.

Initially, there was concern about whether call centre staff would even be able to work remotely due to data protection. But now their domestic trenches are the frontline of financial first aid.

MONEY Mail has been granted exclusive access to recordings from a day at Santander’s helpline. They tell the inside story of how one of the UK’s biggest banks is scrambling to deal with calls from desperate families whose finances have been hit hard by the pandemic.

Critics say lenders have dragged their feet on loans to troubled firms, while phone lines have buckled under a surge in demand.

Last month, staff absences and closures of overseas call centres reduced capacity at some banks by 25 pc to 40 pc, leaving skeleton teams to take tens of thousands of calls a day about mortgage holidays alone.

It caused marathon waiting times and slowed applications to a halt. One customer told Money Mail of a ten-hour delay trying to get through to Santander.

The bank’s dedicated coronavirus line was launched on March 13. At first, 80pc of calls related to mortgage holidays, but now 80 pc come from vulnerable customers needing access to cash or payment holidays on other debt.

On average, it’s manned by 60 handlers, but there are up to 120 during times of high demand. Today there are 40.

Mark, 39, has been reassigned from the bank’s financial support team. He works 35 hours a week on seven-hour shifts.

He gets through around 13 calls a day at an average of 20 minutes each, but some go well beyond an hour. Mark most frequently deals with couples who have been furloughed, or where one is selfemployed and waiting for Universal Credit to be paid in June. Call centres are also a lifeline for the thousands of vulnerable customers who have been told to ‘shield’.

Schemes have been launched to help those who can’t leave their homes get cash or access vital banking services.

James, 26, has been moved from Santander’s complaints team to its coronavirus line. From his home in Stoney Stanton, Leicestershire, he takes up to 15 calls a day, many from customers who are self-isolating.

At 11.07am he hears from an elderly gentleman who needs money to pay neighbours to do his shopping. The call lasts 16 minutes, and James arranges for the customer to be sent a letter which can be exchanged by his neighbours for £150 cash at the Post Office.

At 11.29am, James takes a 22-minute call from an elderly widow who wants to send £1,000 to her daughter, who has a fivemonth-old baby and whose partner has been furloughed. Fastforward to 2.54pm and there is a short call setting up a loan repayment holiday for a cash-strapped gentleman, before another at 3.25pm from a man with lung disease who says he has no money to order his online groceries after waiting weeks for a delivery slot. At 4.32pm, and then again at 5.29pm, James deals with a diabetic father on Disability Living Allowance who is supporting his furloughed son. An interest-free overdraft of £150 is arranged. And that is only a third of his daily workload. James has worked in customer service for six years, but says he has never experienced so many distressed calls. ‘I think 99 pc of the time you can deal with it,’ he says. ‘But on the odd occasion, it does trigger those emotions for you as well.’ Banks may have taken a hammering, but we still need them. Pippa, a personal banking advisor at Santander’s Exeter branch, says the crisis highlights the human side of her job. ‘We all crave that contact,’ she says. ‘People still need to be able to talk to people. Going computerised is not always the answer for everyone.’

Bosses will do well to remember those words come the next round of branch closures.

Emma, 29, from Glasgow, also works on Santander’s coronavirus line. She says lonely callers tell her it’s like speaking to a counsellor because ‘they have had no one to tell their problems to’.

At 2.08pm, she takes a call from an elderly woman living alone in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. It starts off simple enough: she needs a bank card and Pin to get cash to pay her daughter for shopping.

But the conversation meanders for more than ten minutes, taking in everything from her three heart attacks to her caring neighbour (‘It is wonderful to have friends’) to Donald Trump (‘This stupid man says if you use disinfectant, you won’t get it’).

The weekly clap for NHS carers has expanded to acknowledge others, including teachers, bus drivers and supermarket workers.

It is hard to imagine applauding anyone who works for a bank, but maybe we should do that, too.