I’ve just spent over 20 minutes on hold. I’m just ‘putting it out there’ that NatWest should perhaps consider changing their hold music. If they do insist on being a one track pony then they’ve got a commitment to only make you listen to their one track, once. Maximum. After 10 minutes and several restarts of the smokey, attention seeking, grating sax solo, I spoke to a lady who (after listening to me explain my issue in detail), transferred me to another department. “Can you tell me if I’ll I be on hold for ages again?” I asked, “Oh no, I’ll put you straight through” said she. This retort gave me something to think about whilst I waited for another 10 minutes on hold; she hadn’t technically lied to me, rather, given an answer to a different question. If I’d asked, “Are you going to make a cup of tea and do a little dance” her answer would have been appropriate. A more appropriate answer to my “on hold for ages” question would have been “Yes, ten minutes or so, and then you’ll have to explain the issue all over again because I won’t pass any notes on, or communicate in any way with the person I’m transferring you to. The agent will have to start right from the beginning – security questions, the lot.”.

All of this was over a relatively trivial issue as well. I had a choice in the matter. I could have not phoned and been £6 out of pocket (I’ll spare you the boring details) or phoned them up to find out how to get them to not charge me £6 for something they were about to ‘wrongly’ charge me for.  Instead I jumped through their press one for this, then 4 for that hoops, pitched my case – twice – and was tied to a phone playing the same horrendous hold music over and over and over again for 20 minutes. No wonder banks get a bad name for ‘service’ at times.

I don’t often write negative stuff here on DragonDrop.org. I just did though. I’m hoping that NatWest reads this. (the title is no coincidence, as I’ve got it so it automatically spawn a tweet for blogs I write using the title as the tweet body.. so oh Hai @NatWest_Help !) I’m not really that disgruntled to be honest, but if you do read this, I can only hope that you’ll put my thoughts, particularly the hold music change request issue, on a relevant list. Can you go over it on the list with a highlighter pen please – perhaps even add a note next to it with something like “Customer Experience QUICK WIN; low effort, high yield improvement” Flourish with a few exclamation marks and underlines if you like. Thanks. Either that or pimp your call centre to the point where a customer never has to hold longer than a minute and only has to authenticate, once. #BigAsk. That’s why I’ve gone in with the hold music change angle you see. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

I guess some people moan about much bigger issues than my trivial first world problem, but,  (and this is the reason I’m keeping it), shy bairns get nowt.

In other news, Annie is lovely. Here’s a picture of her just now, eating mashed potato for the first time ever. She loved it.