It’s amazing how often a single experience can demonstrate both very poor and very good customer service. It’s even more amazing that organisations do not do more to ensure every customer encounter is a great one, especially when most of the time poor service is down to the fact that they simply have not provided the right customer service training to their people.

I recently had a problem with my credit card where the card had accidently been cracked and so was close to being unusable. I therefore called my bank (a very well known and respected one) to order a replacement one. A simple enough task, or so I thought!

After putting me on hold to sort everything out, the customer service operative came back and told me that she was unable to order me a new one as the system had declined the request. I asked her why, and she said the system didn’t give any more information than simply “Declined”.

This completely baffled me as I’ve been with the bank for 13 years for both my credit card and my current account, have always made payments on time, have never gone outside my credit limits and have a perfect credit score – a near perfect customer I thought. I dutifully explained this to her and all I got was the famous line from Little Britain… “Computer Says No”.

When I asked what I could do to help sort this out, given that most likely it was a problem with their system, I was told “You could try again in 6 months”. I was getting no-where and decided to try a different route.

So I signed into my internet banking account and sent in a message regarding this, and within 24 hours I got a phone call apologising for the mistake and telling me that my new card was on its way. They also said that the customer service operative should have been able to sort this out for me and they’d be looking into the matter.

Maybe some customer service training would help, I thought.

By Chris Banting | International Marketing Manager & Business Development Manager