Customer support

It’s possibly irrational, but I still like the idea of being able to walk into a physical branch of a bank. Maybe it’s because I like knowing that if things got really bad, I could just turn up and complain in-person.

We’ve probably all felt the alternative: trying to complain to an online-only company, when all they have is a phone line, which nobody answers. You feel helpless.

The challenger banks—who don’t have any branches—are battling against this perception, trying to convince the world that you don’t need them at all.

Meanwhile, the incumbent banks are closing branches to reduce costs, and trying to optimise how many they keep open.

The trend is clear: in the future we will do less of our banking in-branch, and more online, likely through a mobile app.

To answer this, I tracked two realistic customer service scenarios over a few weeks, whilst controlling as many of the variables as I could.

The first was to see how quickly I can speak with a human over the phone. This was measured from the moment I made the call, so it includes all the time I spent listening to their automated messages.

This is because it’s misleading for a bank to claim that they answer all their calls within 5 minutes, if the user has to sit through 15 minutes of announcements first.

But this doesn’t paint the full picture, you also need to understand how consistent the banks were.

But what about the growing popularity of giving support over a live chat?

I wanted to mimic the following plausible scenario: you’re trying to send a friend some money late into the evening, perhaps for a taxi, but the app keeps crashing.

Note: Co-op, Metro, First Direct and Nationwide do not have in-app live support, at least, not out of hours.

And when you look at how consistent the banks were with their replies, you can clearly see which ones offer suitable ‘out of hours’ support.

In fact, Revolut do something really strange: if they don’t reply within a few hours they just close the ticket.

Whilst the results of this test are clearly anecdotal, and from a relatively small sample size, it does suggest which companies can consistently provide responsive customer support.

But what about the broader user experience? That’s what the rest of this chapter explores.

This is a terrible user experience. Not only is it an unnecessary memory challenge, but often none of the choices feel suitable.

Call routing like this was introduced in the 1980s, when a company would have one phone number, and it’d be printed in the local paper.

But, 40 years later, it’s nothing more than an annoyance for most users. And, it’s totally unnecessary now. This is what should happen:

So which banks still ask you to make selections while on the phone?

Imagine queueing for a ride at Disneyland, but the queue wraps around a corner and it’s neither moving, nor can you see how long it is. It’d be frustrating, right?

But although people love to moan about long queues, there are two important subconscious things influencing their behaviour, while they’re in one.

When either of these elements are missing, the experience is considerably more frustrating. In particular, without being able to track your progress, you don’t have as good a reference for the time you’ve already invested.

Or rather: someone who knows that they’ve completed 60% of a process is more likely to continue than someone who is 6 minutes into a process of unknown length.

Imagine how much harder it’d be to climb a mountain if you didn’t know how high the peak was.

In the physical world, these factors come with no effort—it’s just how queues work. But in the digital world its value needs to be recognised and implemented.

For clarity, saying “your wait time is approximately 20 minutes” at the beginning of the process is not the same. The real value is in the subconscious ability to constantly re-estimate your waiting time based on your progress and position.

Disneyland know this, and they’ve doubled down on it by anchoring different points of the queue with new approximate waiting times—this helps keep your sense of progress up, while maintaining realistic expectations.

You may be thinking

“Sure, but this would be really difficult to do for a call centre queue”.

Nope, Twilio do it—if you implement their API correctly. You can set it to tell the user every 30 seconds where they are in the queue, and how long the estimated wait is.

Or even better, give them push notifications via the app to show them where they are in the queue.

To reuse the Disney analogy, imagine you’re in that queue—the one where you’re standing still—but this time there’s a speaker right next to your head.

That speaker is playing the same 20 second jingle over and over again, and for some reason it is massively distorted. Like, it’s twice as loud as it needs to be, and more distorted than you’ve heard from any speaker made in the last decade.

Well, this is precisely what hold music is. Just have a listen for yourself.

Something I need to make clear here is that the quality is not terrible because I’ve recorded it poorly, I promise you, that’s how bad they sound.

Seriously, listen to Santander’s—why it is so loud?

So, which banks play the same jingle on repeat?

It’s common for apps that require authentication—like banks—to automatically log you out after a period of inactivity.

This is actually a good thing, because if you leave your phone on a table in Starbucks, and somebody finds it, they can’t access your online banking.

But the vast majority of ‘auto-locks’ happen while you’re at no risk, like when you’ve got a live chat window open and your phone goes to sleep.

It’s obvious really, but if this happens, you’d expect to reauthorise yourself, and land straight back onto the live chat. But most of the time, your journey looks more like this:

So which banks kept persistence of the live chat, even after having to reauthenticate yourself?

I should add that I tested this so many times, and neither group was absolutely consistent. Very occasionally Starling would also redirect you to the chat page, but most of the time it didn’t.

Every now and then with software you see something brilliant, and it immediately feels like the obvious thing to do. It’s a rare moment, and as someone who obsesses over UX, it feels like a glimpse into the future.

Well, I had one of those moments, while I was on the phone to Monzo, navigating my way through their automated decision tree.

“Press 1 for help with your bank statements…”

I actually pressed that option by accident—which nullified the speed run—but then something amazing happened: I instantly received a notification.

This is revolutionary—and I mean that literally, not hyperbolically— because it demonstrates a new way to interact with a customer.

The potential for this concept is huge. It could remove a lot of the friction from customer support:

And it’s not just limited to banking. Any company that has both an app, and telephone customer support should be implementing this.

Your phone is already your wallet, your car keys, your TV and your light switch.

Now, I appreciate that some people—particularly older customers—will probably always be reliant on the traditional methods. And that’s fine, innovation doesn’t have to immediately replace its predecessor.

In fact, it rarely does.