Comment by cbg0
2 years ago
It definitely would have, because you can walk into a branch office and talk to a real person, not some AI chat bot that creates a ticket after boring you to death with unhelpful answers, and then you end up waiting for that to be looked at and async back and forth that can take days.
It may unfortunately not help, in such cases, the salesman sitting in the bank ("account representative") is not more useful than a flower in an office pot.
All they can do is to tell you to wait for weeks for feedback, and if you don't comply, call the security on you.
This real person doesn't really have any significant advantage.
From my personal experience, when you have a problem the only thing they can do is to call someone and talk on your behalf, and you can do the same from home, btw. The only advantage the banker has in this case is that they have those numbers on fast dial. But keep in mind that even if you called the right department nothing can be resolved immediately and all the following communications are by paper mail, so it takes months to recover your funds.
interestingly my brick-and-mortar bank (ING Netherlands) also stopped accepting walk in appointments during covid and conveniently kept that on now. So you have to deal with this shit anyway just to talk to someone, but yes at least there are still people
And banks are closing all of their physical presences one after the other. Pretty soon they'll just be a bank of computers and an AI for all of your interaction.
I hope to have shut down my business activities by then.
That, in theory, should create the space for a challenger bank providing real-people interaction. Metro Bank seems to be doing that (yes, they are currently in trouble, but so are a lot of other banks - interest rate changes caught a lot of folks off-guard).
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In all likelyhood they have little more to go on than the same script the AI has, except maybe they also watched a training video published a long time ago that is now out of date.