Fancy HQ nearby, Distant Contact Centre Far away
Imagine making a local call for assistance and almost instantly being ushered into an Indian landscape.
Virtually being forced to converse about your banking issues with someone thousands of miles away, who mispronounces your name, mumbles his own and interrogates you as one ‘guilty until proven innocent’.
Worse is that after shocking you and quickly subduing you, your agent asks curtly whether there is anything else he can do for you. Certainly, there is so much that needs to be done. So much that the poor agent, who is five and a half hours away, on Indian Standard Time and even further away in terms of his grasp of your own context, can do little about.
Our Forefathers taught us to build our city home after we have built our village home. My bank prefers the wisdom of frustrating its local customers first, by sending its contact centre as far away as possible in terms of language, culture and geography while it offers us a royal corporate Headquarters building, equipped with all the fancy that it can come up with. Mind you this building is so smart that they have to seize your ID at the entrance and a security guard will need to coach you on how to use the lifts and an attendant will need to show you how to operate the Self-Service Boom Barriers, as you drive in and out.
In my world, this just does not make sense. It seems obvious that the outsiders here are the Customers and that the lessons, that the Nigerian Banks taught them a decade ago. have still not been learnt.
Maybe my bank is probably too big to fail and the size of my deposits (after such mistreatment, what do you expect?) does not make much of a difference. I dare say, however, that I speak the unspoken thoughts of thousands of customers who are looking for the next opportunity that the next disrupter will bring or is actually in the process of bringing.
