OddThinking

Wander in the branch at lunch-time today to see what they offer. While I am looking for the appropriate brochures, one of the tellers calls me over to see if she can help me.

++ There are two tellers (and a manager) available, and zero customers.
– Teller does mediocre job of explaining the fee structure. (It’s simple. Every electronic transaction has an associated fee, but the first $4 worth of transactions each month are free. She was getting tongue-tied trying to explain it in terms of rebates.)
+ Fee structure suits me to begin with. Coin deposits are free. The rest of minimal electronic transactions per month are effectively free. May need to look again if I go over to this account exclusively.
+ Zero forms to fill in. Account creation is done on-line while you wait.
– Overall, took about 15 minutes, where I had no real role in the transaction but to wait.
– Some of the extra time was because I am apparently atypical, in that I knew my Australian Tax File Number at the time of opening my account.

That caused her to have to go backwards in the Account Opening Wizard (or that’s what I surmised without seeing her computer screen), which required assistance from her manager.
++ While I waited, a customer came in with a sack full of bagged coins. The second teller happily went off into another room to weigh them, and came back quickly with the results.
++ Bank branch is open Saturday mornings. I did a double-take! A bank! (I heard afterwards that Westpac do it too, now.)

Following the tellers instructions, I rang the Phone Banking line to enable electronic banking.

– Why couldn’t I have done it at the same time I opened my account?
++ The very first prompt on the IVR is to press 0 to speak to an operator.
+ The operator was there on a Saturday afternoon.
++ The operator answered practically immediately.
— The operator can’t authenticate who I am, because the original teller has neglected to enter my date-of-birth with my account. Their first error!
+ Operator was apologetic and faked sorrow well.
+ Operator offered to have the problem fixed quickly. I said I would call back in a week; she said I could call back as soon as Monday.

Rang back on Tuesday to enable e-banking.

+ Delay for call-center agent non-zero but trivial.
+ Had fixed the previous problem.
++ Security seems to be handled in sensible way: e.g.
+ I chose the daily limit on transfers to external accounts.
+ For a fee, I can purchase a token-generating fob to link to my account.
+ PINs must be robust (not limited to 4 digits like other accounts I have).

+ The temporary PIN (read to me by machine) was case-insensitive! Yay! I wonder whether the real PIN is.
+ I don’t need to put www at the front of the URL. (CUA take note!)

-Bendigo Bank sent me some junk mail last night. Not an important letter, with some extra junk included, but just a letter saying “Welcome. We have lots of services” and some extra junk included. Thanks, but I already have your Welcome pack. I don’t need more copies.
+Card is already waiting for me at the branch, as promised. 4 working days. That’s pretty good. (Not as good as Handelsbanken, many years ago, who handed me an ATM card the moment I opened my account.)

Does the junk mail really count as junk mail? If it’s a once-off, I reckon let it slide. I’ve often had double-ups (or multiple copies) of text through the mail that I already got through some other process. I guess they’re just checking that you know everything, right?

+ Went to branch at lunch-time; 3 tellers, no customers, no lines.
+ Picked up card, no hassle.
++ Deposited $650 worth of coins, with absolutely no complaints. Was weighed quickly.
– The deposit slips seem a little more onerous than they have to be. e.g. writing the cheque number out on the deposit slip?
+ PIN arrived in mail as promised

Sunny, it is certainly not as bad as unsolicited junk mail.

I think the scale (from good to bad) goes like this:

• A genuine bill or statement.
• An envelope with a genuine bill or statement stuffed with some additional information about the services I am using.
• An envelope with a genuine bill or statement stuffed with sales pitch about the services I am not using.
• Just additional information about the services I am using.
• Just a sales pitch about the services I am not using.
• Unsolicited junk mail.

So this was the third-worst, by my scale.

When each institution I am with takes their own opportunity to use their relationship with me to expose me to additional adverts, the result is a large pile of junk that I am forced to sift through, to get the important bits..

The CUA annoy me by sending me envelopes that contain nothing but reminders that I haven’t taken them up on their special offer (which came in another stand-alone envelope) for a service I do not need.

(Oh, and they know I already know everything I need to know about my account, because they (as required by law) thrust a 55-page Product Disclosure Statement in my hands the moment I suggested I was interested in opening an account.)

This is not a show-stopper; I can let it slide, but I am just keeping an eye on it.

(On that note: I received another letter from Bendigo Bank on Friday welcoming me to the eBanking system. It contained very little I didn’t already know, but I can see it might be helpful from a security perspective to notify the owner by mail, to reduce the risk of identity theft.)

+ Used the account for an eBay purchase. Completely uneventful. Yay!
– Tried to associate it with a PayPal account. I needed the BSB number. I have close to hand over a hundred pages of Bendigo Bank brochures, product disclosure statements, financial services guides, fee schedules and business cards. I skimmed through them all. No sign. You would think that they don’t have a BSB number!
– I went to the web site expecting it to appear on the front page. No luck. Clicked around aimlessly. Eventually I had to use the search feature to find it. For future reference, it is 633-000.

I filled in a web-form to report my difficulty. I’ll be interested to see how their escalation channels deal with it.

++ The next business day after submitting my complaint, they rang me and left a message on my machine. Two days later, after I had failed to return the call, they chased me up again.

The support agent (Nicole) explained that my suggestion had been escalated to several different groups to consider in their next meeting. She thanked me for my suggestion.

She explained to me where the information was on the web site (under the Contact Us page off the front page, which sounds very sensible when you put it that way!) When I mentioned I found it on the search engine, she explained the search engine was still fairly new and that suggestions like mine were helpful.

Overall, I couldn’t ask for a better response.

Yeah about the BSB…

I had much the same trouble. I’m impatient though, but after a quick look i decided to just search for bendigo bank BSB on Google. I remember it now, but it was a pain remembering that every time i need to confirm it I would have to go to another website. It does make some sense that it would be on the contact us page, but I am a web designer and I couldn’t find it… But i guessed it was just me.

Thatll be enough ranting for now!

R

++ I have loved all my dealings with Bendigo, they’re fast and friendly and they just give you that community feel. I switched there from Comm Bank so I was certainly not expecting a bank with this much character! Finally someone who doesn’t penalise me for giving them my money!

Gee Julian

Is there anything else you actually do in your spare time?

Bendigo Bank is one of the Banks that seems to care. I live in a town where they closed all of the major bank’s, but Bendigo Bank came in and supported us as a community. Now the big banks are begging us for their business…funny that….

Now on the subject of analysing any mistake they make….well I am sure as a human being Julian you make the occassional mistake, it is how you go about fixing and leaning from them…time for you to take up another hobby..

First, let me start with a piece of advice for blog-commenters and Usenet-repliers everywhere:

Consider carefully who will be perceived as having the sadder life:

(a) A person who uses their spare time to write about a topic that you find dull but they find interesting.

(b) A person who uses their spare time to read articles about topics that they find dull, and then more of that spare time to snipe about that.

Now, also remember that I haven’t posted on the subject since March last year…

Cindy,

I don’t occasionally make mistakes. I regularly and persistently make mistakes.

When I am designing systems that can seriously affect people’s lives – say, for example, like systems that calculate someone’s bank balance – I try to put in protections that prevent, detect and remedy errors. I do this because I know I make mistakes frequently, and I have never trusted anyone who claims that they are different.

Nonetheless, I have been suffered under financial institutions – even very big ones – that don’t seem to have those levels of protection. (If they do have protections, it seems to be always in their favour, and never in the customers’!) The number of their mistakes that impacted me was unacceptable, and I exercised the little power that I had: changing financial institutions.

So, my motivation of trialling Bendigo Bank was to see whether their systems were robust enough to give me a feeling of security – that my money wasn’t going to be misplaced, and I wasn’t going to be spending my spare time chasing up bank errors.

I would suggest that the quick handling of the DOB error, and the high quality support-call handling of the BSB issue would suggest that they have given this type of issue some careful thought.

One more note for commenters: This page is appearing on the first page of the Google results for Bendigo Bank.

I imagine a few Bendigo Bank employees may have stumbled across it. Your comments on the bank may have more impact on readers if you include a disclaimer about your relationship with the bank.

I, for example, am merely a customer of Bendigo Bank.

About BSB’s again….You’re right – very difficult to find the information on the website – had much more luck here!..after a Google search.
Hope it’s 633 000 for ALL branches……????
Just trying to pay someone – so if anyone from BBank is reading this – get it clearly on the website!

It’s been well over a year since I opened my Bendigo Bank account, and they have been bloody good so far. I am overdue to take the next step in the big move: get myself a credit card.

+ Went into the branch, and, as usual, was immediately greeted with no queue.

+ Upon asking about credit cards, I was immediately handed a folder full of details and application forms. Some of the highlights were explained to me personally before I left the bank.

– There are a wide range of credit cards available, but despite having a “comparison chart” printed out from a web-site, the differences between them were small and hard to value. It took me a long time to work out what was right for me. Confusopolies are meant to apply between banks, not inside a single bank.

– At one stage, it appeared that the most appropriate credit card to meet my needs had pictures of puppies on it. That may not seem like a problem to some people, but it caused me to ask myself difficult questions: How much would I be willing to pay in bank fees per year to not have puppies on my credit card. (Answer: About $10 per annum.)

– There was an unnecessary plethora of application forms asking for the same information, depending on which card you wanted. Some forms handled multiple card types, others were only required for puppy lovers. They could have consolidated it to one form.

– When I went in to apply, the procedure was slow and unnecessarily detailed. I understand you need to take care when providing credit, but the questions I was being asked seemed unnecessary given my credit history and the small amount of credit I was requesting. I had to wait for a long time while they photocopied my records going back 12 months. (Perhaps this serves me right for taking in more than the barest details!)

– It’s been almost week. Still haven’t received the approval.

++ In the last comment, I gave a negative because they hadn’t responded to me for a week. I was right outside the bank today, so I popped in. Turns out they had responded promptly and left me not one but two messages. It was my own incompetence with my mobile phone that delayed me receiving the message. Mea culpa. Sorry, BB!

— The envelope with my PIN for my new credit card never arrived (It was due around July 18.) This might be a postal error, rather than a bank error. Heck, it might be my error; I guess it is possible I threw it away unopened. However, my other financial institutions have awaited some form of signed acknowledgement that the PIN was received. Bendigo Bank didn’t notice. Luckily I wasn’t in a rush, and I had the card in my possession so I knew I wasn’t being defrauded.
++ I visited the branch today. Two tellers, no queue, despite the fact that the shopping area was the most crowded I had ever seen in on a non-election day.
– I requested a replacement PIN, while in the branch. It will be sent to me in 5 days. Why can’t I simply set it in the office in person? (Perhaps to protect against internal fraud?)
– I couldn’t work out from the web-site how to automatically pay the balance of my credit card account from my savings account every month.
+ When I visited the branch, my request (to automatically pay off the balance) required the junior teller to double-check with a senior teller, as the process had recently changed, but the new process was painless, and was quickly sorted out.
– I took the opportunity to request that my savings account be associated with my credit card, so I only need carry one card in my wallet. There was some confusion about this, and the senior teller told me it wasn’t possible. He then suggested I get a Visa debit card. (A Visa debit card doesn’t meet my needs, so that was a waste of time.)

I didn’t really mind carrying two cards, so I left the branch moderately happy.

+/– It turns out that it is possible to associate my two accounts on one card. (+ for being able to do it. — for being given wrong information.)
++++ I found this out when the junior teller came up to me in the street as I left another shop two doors down. She assured me that not only was the association possible, but had been completed.

Yes, the teller realising the mistake came around from behind the security screen, walked out of the bank and looked for me out on the street to apologise and make sure I understood my (mild) desire for a single card had actually been carried out.

I can’t imagine tellers from the ANZ taking such a step. I was most impressed!

Bendigo rules. I changed years ago when CBA decided to attempt extorting $60 a year out of me for the privilege of lending my money to someone else. I find (just as you do) that I rarely have to queue and having all branches open on Sat is awesome. Most people I tell refuse to leave the major banks, guess they like getting reamed? It’s easy to stay under the $4 transaction limit by buying most things on a fee free credit card (Virgin), although sometimes you get funny looks whipping out the card for a $2 cheeseburger 😉

I’m afraid my happiness with Bendigo Bank is at an end.

I got a letter yesterday saying that new charges and fees would now be placed on my Bendigo Blue (ATM) card, and my Red credit card.

Blue card – $3 a month. Credit card – $45 a year annual fee.

I can change the Blue card to a fee-free cash card, but there are no such alternatives at Bendigo for a fee-free credit card. Looks like I’ll be getting a Virgin card as well.

I just feel sorry for all the people in rural and regional towns that the big banks have deserted, and who have supported the spread and establishment of Bendigo Community Banks all over Victoria.

For these people in isolated towns, there are no alternatives. They might not be able to get to the next biggest town to swap accounts. As it is, they show loyalty to Bendigo Bank and this is what they cop in return.

Its disgusting that Bendigo use the excuse of “increasing costs of service provisions” etc as the reason for the fee hikes. Last I looked Bendigo raked in $75 million in profit in the six months to December 2007, and were involved in taking over other banks. It doesn’t sound like they are struggling for resources for mine.

Bendigo, this isn’t how a true community bank would treat its customers.