Meeting expectations

Pete

There's been a great story about a BT customers frustration in trying to query a bill and how, when he posted his story on YouTube, he finally received an apology and compensation from BT.

It reminded me of a recent report on how bad financial institutions were in responding to email requests made via their web sites - very few were able to respond within 24 hours - given the primary benefit of email is speed this seems quite unreasonable.

If you set up the expectation that users can communicate with you this way then you have to ensure you have the resources to deal with the enquiries.

With the uncertainty created by the loss of the 25 million records by HMRC you can pretty much bet that the volume of calls and emails to banks will be significantly higher than normal. Let's hope the banks can improve their service at a time when customers are most in need of reassurance.