Service, Social Media and Banking

To date, I've never used my blog for a rant. But since I speak and have a position on social media, because I preach the gospel of the power of the word of mouse, and I have a genuine beef, here goes...

A couple of banks here in the UAE have really worked hard on the social front. They've appointed social media agencies, they're responsive, they seem to have a good finger on the pulse of their customers and their target market. But what happens when their core social face – their real people, the customer service folks, their front desk people, their tellers fail them? What and how can they avoid the social repercussion?

My wife is at the moment a pretty irate customer at a local socially aware bank. They've pretty much mismanaged her hard earned and saved funds with them, not reporting fund changes, not bothering to tail the market movements, resulting in her losing a fair amount of green. Of course, there's always valid excuses, of course, Greece went down, of course, of course, of course...

But when she calls her so called Relationship Manager and asks to speak to a supervisor, and there's absolutely no call back, no 'how may we help?', no 'is something bothering you' callback, there's a natural response – which is negative. No one cares? Perhaps they do. Perhaps they're all really busy. And perhaps, they are all so busy that they didn't have time to follow the market and adjust her investments?

And thus, this pushes me to blog, to tell tales about the lack of responsiveness, the sheer absence of customer service. That's what pushes me to tweet, as I did: #Rakbank #fail