The other day, we decided to register for a broad range of financial service products. All from major UK banks, all products that are widely available. Time to see if the much talked about ‘reforms’ that banks have supposedly undergone at top-level result in any improvements at retail level.
You can probably guess what’s coming.
And that’s the disappointing part. That our expectations of the services offered by one of society’s more important constituents have sunken so low – if they were ever high to begin with. We experienced all the usual; big promises upfront and loophole smallprint excuses for not delivering once we’d signed the dotted line. Besides largely appalling online services (that don’t work or only if you’ve a computer science PhD) and phone agents that can’t or won’t help, the language was particularly bad.
Jargon. Meaningless error codes and messages. Long complicated sentences written by lawyers. All designed presumably so that excuses could be made later on. And, unfortunately, all across the board. Even those banks that pride themselves on helpfulness or simplicity did little better than the rest.
It’s no surprise then that banks continue to be such easy targets for the media. Besides immense bonus payouts it’s ‘the little things’ that banks get wrong. How well online banking works, how long it takes for a human to answer the phone and how a bank speaks and explains itself. Things that matter to customers. If these don’t work the first time and work easily, if you can’t help us when something’s wrong, if we can’t understand you, how can we even begin to trust you?
Part of what will slowly change people’s perceptions (and perhaps restore trust) is a new language. The financial institution that understands this and adopts a simpler and more direct way of describing who they are, what they do and how they do it will at least be on the road to striking a new chord with the audiences that need to fall back in love with them again. A loss of trust in financial institutions ultimately hurts all of us everywhere.
