Eloise HorsfieldSPANISH bank Santander faces criticism once again after coming third in a poll exposing shoddy customer service in the UK.
The hapless bank received one in five of the votes, bettered only by TalkTalk and HM Revenue & Customs, in the Daily Mail’s Wooden Spoon Award.
Despite improving on their second place finish in last year’s poll, the bank received 19 per cent of the vote.
The result is the latest blow in Santander’s battle to shrug off the tag of ‘Britain’s Worst Bank’.
According to the Financial Services Authority (FSA), Santander had 216,000 complaints between 1 January and 30 June 2010.
Long queues in branches, unhelpful call centres and untrained staff are among the most common complaints from customers.
Other companies to feature in the poll were Virgin Media, Ryanair, Lloyds Banking Group, Orange and npower.
Bit strange, the two branches of Santander which I use have more or less the same staff as they had when they were Abbey National, I don’t have any complaints except perhaps the length of the queue but that is common in all banks as the Tellers are required to witter on about whether or not you require “car insurance, house insurance, life insurance, is your mortgage with us, etc, etc” in order to ensure they ask an adequate number of people each day to meet their targets. And being honest I have every sympathy for them. Bring back the Bank Manager who knew everybody or am I harking back to a time long forgotten in the mists of time. To sum up, Santander are no worse and no better than RBS and HBoS with whom I also have dealings.
I agree that Santander is the worst UK bank. The online banking service is a nightmare. I haven’t been able to access my current account for two months. Their so-called helplines are useless.
Santander is not just a terrible UK Bank, They have not produced my loan documents from a loan that they purchased for more than 14 months.
They don;t even have a record of my requests each month for over 18 months. Either their staff is totally incompetent or they are crooks and have been stealing my money for the past 14.