It is probable that there are very few of us who haven’t gotten grumpy with our bank at some time or other.

But you have to be pretty darned grumpy to withdraw $190,000 in cash, stipulated in $20 bills.  Mapua artist Roger Griffiths quit his bank of 25 years and carried his cash down the road to the Nelson Building Society.

We’re told Roger’s parting with his local Westpac branch was over its refusal to give him a mortgage.  In defense of its position, the bank says that it just needed to be confident that regular repayments could be made on the requested mortgage.

After 25 years you’d expect that the bank would have some knowledge of its previously loyal customer, and would have realized that as an artist remuneration comes in dollop-form rather than a dribbling salary.

It’s conceivable that this very public customer grievance has done more than $100,000 of damage to the bank’s reputation as, aside from the bad press, Roger’s action may surely embolden others to reflect on their own grievances and ponder action.

When incidents as dramatic as this arise we are left to wonder how an individual within a major corporation can, in spite of all the policies, training and supervision, act in a way that fires customers up to the point where they terminate the relationship.

It was another bank this week, BNZ, which reportedly left it to individual customers to sort out an error, and private information was disclosed. The aggrieved customer again went public because she just wants people to know about the “terrible” service she had received.

How vulnerable we are to front line people, all businesses, but particularly banks.

Tags: BNZ, crisis management, customer service, Westpac

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 10:40 am and is filed under Brand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.