A service call from the NAB

Hi,

I had a moment of mirth this morning, thanks to my ex-bank, the NAB. I still have some cards with them, but we moved the business after years of being treated like sheep.

I took a call from someone at the bank’s call centre who was ID-ing me for the cards – giving me a password, etc. Just a few questions: what is your full name? Got that one right. Date of birth: I gave it. No, that’s not what I have here, said our ‘customer service officer’. “Well I aught to know my birth date better than you would,” I said.

Then came the punch line: “Now you’ll have to go to a branch and show them your driver’s licence and we can change our records.” I was dumbstruck. For half a second. “No, I won’t be going anywhere.” (It is 38km to the nearest town where there’s a sub-branch of said bank. We live in the bush.) “It’s your stuff up. You sort it out!” CSO: “I’ll have to speak to a manager.” By this time I had abandoned the phone to my wife who has endless resources of patience with ‘customer service’ people.

The CSO eventually called our ex-branch and someone there looked up the file and bingo! If the NAB got a basic fact like DOB wrong after more than a decade of doing business with us, what other data do they get wrong? My balance?

What can we conclude about my former bank from this incident? One: it is standard practice to force customers to go to a branch to verify their details when the bank gets it wrong. The call centre operator gave me the instruction without reference to a manager. The “Go To A Branch” instruction must be written into the bank’s call centre script. Standard practice. Two: It hasn't changed.