It’s easy to rant about banks: they’re easy targets in this day an age. An old friend of mine told me that banks are organizations that would give you an umbrella on a sunny day and take it away the very next time it rains. This goes beyond the rant about how the financial sector has single handedly thrown the world into recession and reaped giant bonuses too boot; this is about the fundamental lack of customer services that so characterizes the banking industry.
A friend of mine applied for a small car loan and her credit score was just not high enough to qualify for the automatic rubber stamp approval. This apparently meant that the loan application had to be processed through the “manual” application process and that this would take a minimum of 48 “business” hours. In particular, since it was after closing on Wednesday, the application was processed Thursday morning and thus the funds couldn’t be made available until Monday morning.
I understand service time estimates and guarantees very well: I run a small company. People need sleep and recreation … they even need food several times a day. A complex process initiated by a customer request can be done quickly on a rush basis, but your service time guarantee for normal requests has to take your “people” resources into account.
But larger organizations don’t specifically need to block off lunch hours (as shifts can rotate) and the process of granting a loan application is a matter of gathering a set amount of data and stamping “approved” or “denied” on the form. Additionally, it seems to be a disservice to insist on a uniformly long wait period when the decisions have already been made.
In this particular case, all the information was provided and after all the questions were dealt with, the bank has gone silent… only saying that there would be no official response until Monday. It’s worth also noting that moving everything forward has required much pushing on my friend’s part: the bank was definitely not returning calls on a timely basis.
I suppose the goal of the bank is simply to provide a sufficient level of service that people, on average, don’t complain too loudly to the government, which is the only entity to which they are obliged to listen.
What’s even worse is that the upshot was that approval was actually available right after close of business Friday, but not passed on till Monday morning — making the long wait *obligatory*.