“Your call is important to us. All our agents are currently occupied with other calls please hold and your call will be placed in priority sequence and will be answered by the next available representative.”

Does this sound familiar?

Well if you have ever called a banking organization then you have heard that recording.

Even though they try to make the automated system sound as if there is a human on the line it certainly can make you feel unappreciated when you can’t seem to talk to an actual person.

It’s worse if you have an emergency that happens after banking hours and it can’t be rectified by going online.

So are customers really important to banks?

Well have you ever noticed that when the banks want to get in touch with you they find it easy to do so?

They know where you live and work and they have all your numbers.  If they can’t get through with a text or phone call, they send an email.

The worse part is when they call you encouraging you to sign up for some service. The chatty representative cheerfully outlines the benefits of using a particular service while you have a million things that you would rather be doing instead of listening to her rattle on.

When they call me I usually wait for her to pause then tell her that I am busy so I can’t talk anymore right now and make vague plans for future discussions.

So what happens when it’s our turn?

Well I had the unfortunate experience on April 3, 2018 at midday of going to an ATM owned and operated by National Commercial Bank and receiving no funds.  After following the instructions on the screen the automated message read, ‘Thanks for using our service’ but no money or receipt was issued. Even worse the machine did not return my card until six minutes later.

I thought perhaps that machine was malfunctioning so I went to another location. While in the line, the other persons who were waiting to do transactions started to walk away. When I asked what was happening I was told that while the machine accepted deposits, it was not allowing customers to withdraw their funds.

At that point I decided to go to another institution’s ATM even though I knew that would cost me extra. Imagine my disappointment when the request was denied and the receipt had the words ‘ Your financial institution is unavailable’.

I saw that I was near a NBC kiosk where a National Commercial Bank customer representative was seated, when I told her of the situation she made a call and reported that the system was down and they were trying to get it back up soon. She was apologetic and stated that  she was sorry for the inconvenience.

Since I didn’t want to spend the day driving around hoping the system was back up, I hoped that I could call and get some information about their progress.  Of course that was a nightmare as calls to the bank led to that message that I wrote at the beginning of the post.

After twenty minutes of waiting I got bored and placed the phone on speaker phone so I would hear if they ever came. Of course thirty minutes later I was still waiting. I finally gave up and hung up. I wish I could tell you that the system is back up but I am still waiting to find out.

So how can banks make their customers feel as if they are really important to them?

Well I have a few suggestions how about sending messages to customers if the system goes down for any length of time?

Just a thought. What’s your take? Let me hear from you.