First Direct are resting on their laurels

I joined First Direct back in 1990 and was one of their first customers. I’ve always been keen on firms that embrace new technology and back then telephone banking was pretty cool! I joined and found that their customer service was excellent and recommended it to all my friends. I just couldn’t understand why people would still want to visit the bank for any reason apart from getting out cash.

Nowadays, seventeen years later on, most people use telephone banking and the new thing these days is internet banking. Despite First Direct being tech savvy enough to have been the first to provide telephone banking they are resting on their laurels in the technology department. This is reflected in their internet banking service.

Its always been a bit cumbersome to use but a recent problem with a bill payment has made me realize how “cumbersome” translate to money problems. We made a bill payment to Welsh Water but, unbeknownst to us, we accidentally picked the next (beneficiary) company on the drop down list, Yorkshire Water. We didn’t pick up on this because the next screen asked us for the amount to pay and the next screen to that asked us to confirm the whole transaction. Being a money minded man, my eyes were focused on the amount and I didn’t realize that the beneficiary was wrong. The first we knew of it was when we received a very puzzling letter from Yorkshire water.

We approached First Direct and asked if they could refund us the money (and chase Yorkshire Water for the money themselves) but they couldn’t do this because the error was our own. They have volunteered to chase Yorkshire Water for us and get a cheque sent back to us. They are also chipping six quid into our account to make up for the fact that we’ve lost our early bird payment discount with Welsh Water.

Whilst trying to sort out the above problem I used a mixture of telephone and messaging to communicate with the bank. It is not possible to send emails to First Direct. They say that this is insecure and insist that you use the messaging service on their internet banking platform. There are two problems with this messaging system. One is that it does not allow you to save messages (apart from cutting and pasting the message body into MS Word) and the other is that there is no audit trail. I sent a message to First Direct that did not get acknowledged and when I phoned them they said that they hadn’t received the message. Luckily I had saved the body of the message on my PC. But there was no way of me proving that I had sent them the message.

The whole internet banking platform is starting to look a bit Mickey Mouse compared to their competitors and needs a complete overhaul. I hope they do this. I still feel pretty loyal to First Direct despite this recent problem (yes, it was my fault after all) and I’ve just spent some time talking to them and giving them my feedback. They need to overhaul their bill payment systme so that the beneficiary is confirmed separately to the payment amount. Also that they need to build a permanent record of messages sent into their messaging system. They said that they would pass my comments on to the eCommerce team but I shouldn’t expect to hear anything back. This seems like a bit of a black hole to me. How can First Direct expect to get valuable feedback from their customers if they don’t acknowledge it?