No Service: You Have Not Waited Long Enough!

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.