I tried to phone my bank account manager at my branch of the National Australia Bank today. Let me tell you, it was a rather tedious procedure to endure!

Firstly, you can’t call your account manager directly; you’re forced to call the bank’s hotline. Fair enough, so I called the hotline and was greeted by a recorded message with a tinny sounding voice, which starts to lecture me about all the possible and impossible reasons of my call, just so it can connect me with the right person.

So after all this lecturing from the tinny sounding voice recorder, I had to choose from 8 topics, then from 4 topics, and just when you think you’re done, you have to choose from 4 more topics! If you’re lucky, you get to hear “Please wait, someone will answer your inquiry as soon as possible”. The most frustrating part of this process so far is that it’s not easy to understand the voice recorded messages, so I had to listen to the options at least twice to understand them. In the end, I randomly pressed a number because my question didn’t fit to any of the proposed topics.

After waiting for what seemed to be forever, someone finally answered the phone. The only problem is that this person will not simply connect you to your account manager, even though you know that only your account manager can help you (since he was the one who messed up the account in the first place!). No… this tenacious person on the phone insisted on hearing the whole story just so he can finally say, “I’d better connect you to your account manager because I’m not so sure what to do”. Grrr!

Finally, I thought I was getting somewhere, but unfortunately the connection to my account manager didn’t work! I couldn’t believe it, I had to call the hotline again, sit through the tinny sounding voice recorded messages and repeat my story again to a different guy who was also not willing to connect me to my account manager.

I was eventually connected to my branch, but my account manager was on holidays, so I told my story (for the third time!) to another bank employee. Before he answered my question, he wanted to verify my account number (which isn’t printed on your bank card; read more about this under Internet banking, etc), and information about the last transactions on my bank account. I was thankful I had my bank statement in front of me!

Once the bank employee verified I was who I said I was, he was very nice and friendly, and was finally able to help me.

This whole procedure lasted approximately 25 minutes and at the end of it all, I was quite annoyed. Obviously, the National Australia Bank and I disagree as to what constitutes customer service. They assume that you’d be glad to waste your time on hold on the phone. There must also be a good reason as to why you can’t contact your account manager directly, that good reason simply escapes me!

After this tedious procedure, I really appreciate my former Bank Austria. I can call my account manager directly because she gave me her (bank) telephone number, and (guess what) her email address as well.