Post Office please, please start treating customers as customers

The Post Office call centre getting it badly wrong

I don't like using this blog to deal with my personal hassles but when they illustrate a much wider marketing problem I break the rule.

Before listening to this call centre dialogue you need to understand a few facts:

This refers to the Post Office Travel Money card that acts as a Euro direct debit card

• I applied for one of these things and transferred £50 from my bank account and waited
• The next thing that happens is that the fraud office of NatWest bank contacts me because of unusual transactions on my bank account
• I then learn that at the time the transaction to the Post Office was made two other payments were illegally taken from my account 
• This might be coincidence but it does seem a bit odd. Certainly worth investigating?
• My card arrives and when I try to authenticate it I am told that it has been put on hold

The dialogue you hear is 4th maybe 5th call I have had with the Post Office after sending them a scan of my passport and a copy of my online bank statement showing the £50 transaction.

At this point I am a customer who is clearly not happy. I have not been told why I am being asked for more and more information to get access to MY money. Worse still, I am the one who has suffered a fraud incident that might have be connected with somebody involved with the Post Office -  but nobody is in the least bit interested.

And finally, I am being asked to provide a paper (yep, you know that funny stuff we once used) bank statement.

Now this poor hapless lady at the call centre is not to blame for the Post Office's awful customer service. She is only doing what she is allowed to do. The person to blame is the idiot that set-up the rules of the call centre and the paths that are available for the call centre staff to use.

I hope the Post Office take this as a learning experience and maybe I have saved a few of their customers being exposed to such a poor customer experience.

So if somebody from the Post Office is reading this can I have my money back and please can you investigate what might, just might, be fraudulent activity connected with your organisation. Dick Stroud