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.