See below for text of email sent to manager of my NIB branch today;
I have been an NIB College Green customer for around 10 years now, and I have spent much of that time extolling the virtues of your services (particularly the Freebank account and the old Internet banking platform) to friends and family. With the changeover to the new Danske Bank platform, I wasn’t hugely surprised that there were few teething problems, and when my €6k payment to American Express went missing (because I now have to key in the reference number every month instead of this being taken from the payee details), I took a deep breath and didn’t explode. [For the record, Amex found the payment and allocated it to my account].
However, the more recent problem I have had with a regular transfer of a fixed amount (monthly payment to NTL) and in particular the response from your various customer services teams to this incident has left me with a very bad taste in my mouth regarding NIB. But first, can I ask you why you have now made it so difficult for me to speak to a human being in your branches? Note that I’m not a technophobe by any means. I’m a fairly advance user of internet banking and occasionally telephone banking. So on those few rare occasions when I need to speak to a human, it is very frustrating that I am not able to do so. When I try to get through to my personal banking manager [name deleted], her direct line frequently goes unanswered and there is no voicemail facility. There is not much point in assigning personal banking managers if I’m not able to get in touch. When I ring the listed phone number for the branch, I get through to a call centre. On more than one occasion, the call centre has been unable to get through to the branch, so I’m left again passing messages into the black hole of NIB customer service which, more often than not, elicit no response at all.
But to get back to my current problem – this related to a fixed regular payment from me to NTL of €19.99 on the 3rd of every month. The May payment (the first one after your changeover) worked correctly and included my NTL reference number on the payment. However, for the June & July payments, your system failed to include my NTL customer account number on the transaction. Just to be clear, these are automated transactions with no manual intervention from me, so it is NOT a case that I failed to enter the right reference number myself. So I’m down twenty euro, and NTL are threatening to cut off service for non-receipt of payments. When my NTL statement failed to show the June payment, I started my saga of chasing down NIB to get this problem resolved.
Firstly, I submitted a query on 24th June by ‘secure mail’ on the eBanking platform explaining this problem. The system automatically addressed this email to [name deleted]. I have had no response from [name deleted]as yet.
Last week, I managed to get through to [name deleted]at your branch (I had to push hard with your call centre personnel to get through to someone at the branch) and explained the problem. Orla reviewed the relevant transactions, and informed me that the audit trail shows that the NTL payee details were amended by ‘system’ just after the June payment was made. This leads me to believe that somebody at NIB was aware of this problem, but no-one bothered to communicate with me, the customer. [name deleted]assured me that everything would go through correctly for the July payment. However, when I now review the July payment on eBanking, I find that the reference number on the transaction is NOT my NTL account number, so your systems have repeated the error for the 2nd month in a row.
So here’s what I expect NIB to do;
1) Contact NTL directly and ensure that the June & July payments are allocated to my NTL account (number xxxxx, name [name deleted]). I really don’t have time to be chasing NTL to clean up after your messes.
2) Find out what caused the original problem, and get it fixed before my next payment in early August. If for whatever reason, you cannot fix the problem in time, I expect NIB to make whatever manual adjustments are necessary to ensure that I don’t have to worry about my NTL payments.
3) Find out who knew about the problem in June (presumably, whoever made the manual adjustment to the NTL payee details which [name deleted]described) and find out why they failed to communicate with your customers on this issue.
I look forward to hearing that you are taking ownership of this problem and that I can stop worrying about my NTL service now. I also look forward to hearing what steps you’ll be taking to make it easier for me to deal with NIB in future. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get back to making personal recommendations for NIB in future.