Dear bank – all I want is your telephone number

HSBC also have their phone number on their statements and correspondence, as well as on cheques and on credit/debit cards, so no need to even hunt on the web.

Not any more (January 2016). It is a national number that is just the call centre that plays music indefinitely. A solution to this the banks need to apply is to have a web form system where people can send messages that are replied to by way of an email that advises them when a reply is available for the customer to read on the secure website.

Queue the messages not the people.

Natwest give the number 03457 888 444 for all their branches as far as I know. It is many years since I wanted to contact my branch, but I was put through.

Each branch seems to have a separate international number, so adapting that could be an easy way of making direct contact with the branch.

I guess that Natwest use a central number to allow them to direct calls to the many services that are handled centrally rather than by branches. If that is so then the least they could do is to explain this.

I haven’t found a high street bank yet that is hiding its phone numbers and I’ve looked up Barclays, NatWest, RBS, HSBC, Yorkshire Bank,Bank of Scotland, Lloyds, TSB, Halifax, Santander, and Nationwide. Some require a few more clicks than others and in a number of cases the number is for a customer call centre. Usually this is an 0845 number but encouragingly there are an increasing number of banks with 0345 numbers now appearing [see the recent Which? Conversation : “Costly calls aren’t right – why TSB has ditched 0845 numbers”].

I also use the telephone directory to find numbers – rarely fails for banks.

Nationwide have an excellent list of all their services and phone numbers with a single click – “contact us”. Another couple of clicks and you can find a branch details including its own direct phone number. Irritatingly these are 0845, but putting them into Saynoto0870.com gives the appropriate geographic number.
Barclays similarly has a list of its main phone numbers but under branch finder they give only one central number. Putting this central number into Saynoto0870 brings up a long list of “unverified” branch geographic numbers, but it is by no means exhaustive. Our phone book is no help. I had no luck finding my local branch’s direct number when I asked Barclays. Why the secrecy?

So many companies nowadays want people to contact them through a central number [with its attendant menu] as a filtering process. I can see both the annoying and the good aspects of that system – waiting for a local branch to answer the call can sometimes be more aggravating. I usually find that the “customer service centre” can put you through to the branch without too much hassle. With banks, I suspect most people only have to find the number once and then save it in some convenient form. A lot of our time anxieties these days are over fractions of a minute.

John Ward said – ‘A lot of our time anxieties these days are over fractions of a minute.’

Very true – we think that faster is better so that we save time, and we probably do save a few seconds or even a minute here or there when information is where we think it should be found.

But what is just as important is how we use those saved seconds.

I bet that most if not all of us just use them to worry about something else, rather than doing something productive with them 🙂

RussellR, they (I!) probably use the time to contribute to another conversation. Me, I’m now off into the greenhouse. -:)

That is very very true Malcolm.

I can understand the sense of this for many of the enquiries you need to make of a bank. However there are times when you might want to speak to your branch direct – maybe you’ve left a card somewhere or other possessions, or had a problem with the cash machine. One answer is to have both numbers – your branch can always redirect your call to the central office if appropriate.

Not a bank, but John Lewis – it has to do with wanting to speak direct! Problem with an electrical product under guarantee. Spoke to Southampton store where it had come from – well, thought I did, turned out I was through to a call centre in Exeter. He had logged all the details and advised me to speak to my local store (it only came from Soton originally because my local had no stock). Rang them, pressed the appropriate button for electrical / technical and asked similar questions – only to find I was back in Exeter talking to the guy sitting next to the original one. They deal with all technical queries – including guarantees – centrally. There is again sense in that but what I really wanted was to arrange with the shop to examine it for repair or replace and hopefully get a temporary replacement in the meantime. If only the phone menu had said what it was doing. In the end I did speak to someone in store who dealt with it extremely satisfactorily.

I hate it when you try and call a branch only to be answered by a centralised call centre who then often refuse to connect to you to the branch.

You should be able to call all branches direct. You rarely get to speak to anyone without pressing 1 for this, 2 for that, so general questions could still go to a central call centre or for out of hours queries.