In one of the funniest articles I’ve read today, a man in the UK changed his banking password to be “lloyds is pants” and found the bank changed it to “no it’s not”.
Mr Jetley said he first realised his security password had been changed when a call centre staff member told him his code word did not match with the one on the computer.
“I thought it was actually quite a funny response,” he said.
“But what really incensed me was when I was told I could not change it back to ‘Lloyds is pants’ because they said it was not appropriate. I asked if it was ‘pants’ they didn’t like, and would ‘Lloyds is rubbish’ do? But they didn’t think so.
“So I tried ‘Barclays is better’ and that didn’t go down too well either.
“The rules seemed to change, and they told me it had to be one word, so I tried ‘censorship’, but they didn’t like that, and then said it had to be no more than six letters long.”
Ah brilliant. The banks find the time to charge us loads of fees, read and change customer’s passwords that offend them, and just generally roll around in all their cash, but don’t have time to upgrade their services, like adding mobile banking, getting better interaction design or the million other things they should be doing.
And they wonder why consumers hate banks. No amount of ads about happy banking, or your bank caring about you, or determined to be different, or whatever they advertise to try to convince you they care about you, will ever change the banking culture.
This post is tagged under: random thoughts
Q. If sunshine can make you happy, why can’t a bank?
A. Because sunshine doesn’t charge monthly fees?
I like the “determined to be different” slogan (that they spent a million dollars on).
I don’t want my bank to be different, I want it to not be crap.
I couldn’t care less if it was identical to 50 other banks out there as long as they don’t suck.
The slogan “determined to be different” does beg the question: How determined?
Determined enough to improve customer service? Determined enough to lower fees?
Just how low can the bar for determination be dropped? Would “mildly-inclined-provided-it’s-not-too-much-like-hard-work to be different” be more appropriate?
How about, “determined to make a website that works”, or “determined to make an online account that you don’t have to come into the branch all the time to sign things”.
Having worked in the finance sector for a while (in web development) I really can’t see that changing for the better in the near future.
I also think banks are quite content with you resenting them… they really aren’t out there to impress us unfortunately.
Matt I like it, you should work in marketing.
Determined to be different as long as we don’t need to change anything and can still rort you as much as we do now.
Simon - “I also think banks are quite content with you resenting them… they really aren’t out there to impress us unfortunately.”
No - the banks’ greatest ally is the apathy of their customer base.
The thing is that their plans for growth are all built around offering “wealth management” to their customers. I think they are in for a shock. Hmmm - I feel a blog post coming on.