NatWest online banking and Cora your friendly (but dumb) digital assistant

Always found it useless. It makes you think you can ask it questions, like a proper AI, but it picks out just a few words from your sentence and answers relating to them and nothing else, no parsing at all.

When you get to a person it works!

nib

They are a cartel. There is no where else for customers to go..

Its the same as government.

As anyone who actually thought Starmer would be an improvement on Sunak now realises.

I don't think anyone did, the Labour vote didn't increase significantly from last time, basically the UK public sector.

But any vote for the Conservatives would have been seen as a vote of approval for their antics over the last decade, and few could bring themselves to do that.

Wont stop them going totally batshit crazy on wokerism as an excuse to introduce totalitarianism.

There is that, to be sure.

As a lifelong Conservative voter I believe you have summed that up very well.

I too have wondered about that, but so many large companies are now doing it, indeed it's now harder than ever to find a phone number that will connect to a real human.

I have a now fairly old TomTom sat-nav which comes with free map updates "for life" - which means until the device fails I suppose. I just got a new message saying that a new update was ready to download so went through the usual tedious process - but TomTom forced me to download a new version of their app which connects the device via USB and it simply would no longer allow me to log in. The only way of contacting TomTom that I could find was to type in messages to an virtual assistant, which kept going around in circles. It does seem stupid of them. I certainly can't recommend the brand to anyone and would never buy another device from a company with such poor customer service.

Much the same applies to several banks that I've tried, but fortunately there is a tiny bit of competition in this sector. I suggest you switch banks - my experience of First Direct (part of HSBC) is that you can actually talk to a human if it's really necessary.

Hear, hear - and they are located in the UK which is a major advantage.

I used to bank with HSBC. I made an online payment to somebody who told me his account name was "Smith Gardening", it was actually "Fred Smith". I told the browser pop up to pay anyway.

Later that day one of HSBC's Customer Disservice staff decide I had been conned so cancelled the payment, tried to phone me at my old address then wrote to me at my old address. They then ended online banking until I presented myself at one of their branches to prove who I was, which I refused to do.

Over the next six months they gradually excluded more and more services until the account was unusable. All correspondence, emails and letters, was diverted to the Customer Disservice department. I asked to speak to a manager and was told "managers aren't concerned with customer service". They gave me an email address supposed to be the executive team which also diverted to Customer Disservice.

Fortunately I had a savings account elsewhere so set up a current account at that bank to keep me going. In the end I "Switched" to First Direct, same group but what a difference. I had been banking with HSBC for 58 years when this happened and they didn't give a toss.

A couple of months ago I had a problem when they royally screwed up sending me a replacement secure key. Getting nowhere online and by phone, I wrote a letter to Customer Services and got a phone call from them a couple of days after sending the letter. They agreed their level of service was poor, apologised for the "stress and inconvenience" caused, and credited my account with £75 in compensation!

I still bank with HSBC. It used to be that, when logged in online, you could send a secure message, about anything, and it would be answered within a day or two. Great. Then, this facility disappeared, now the only messages you can leave have to fit into one of the menus they offer, and if they don't, there is no other way offered to contact them. I recently had just this scenario, the only way I could ask a question was to call them on the 'phone. Which, thinking about it, it what we used to do anyway. What goes around comes around.

The only time I got sense out of HSBC was the day I wandered into an actual branch and said 'I have had enough. I want to close this account'. A real human checked my ID, checked the ID of the bank account to transfer the balance into, and did some keyboard stiff and smiled and said 'done'

That's fine if they fix the problem.

All too often a company will, in effect, say: "You have raised a complaint. Here's £x - now sod off and shut up."

This being a substitute for any pretence of fixing the underlying problem.

Or do what so many do nowadays. Reject your complaint and refer you to their trade body/ombudsman to make a complaint knowing most people won't.

It took you 58 years to discover what most of us find out in a couple of years dealing with any bank or insurance company? Loyalty counts for nothing and in the case of insurance companies will cost you a lot more.

Often marketed as an improvement to their customer's web experience.

My bank kept sending me details on how they were going to improve my on-line experience when logging into my account. I can seen absolutely no difference in what I can do on-line compared to what I could do prior to the change. It just was an annoying experience trying to find out in the re-arranged menu where they had stuck all the old features.

Loyalty did count for a lot of that period. I worked for a couple of insurance companies and long serving customers were treasured.

Par for the course I'm afraid. It's just like the software developers who keep introducing new features without fixing the old bugs. :-(

With HSBC, it used to be possible to send a secure message to them while logged in. Then that disappeared, you are now restricted to a specific menu of subjects, and any query sent to the chatbot finally results in a suggestion to call them on the 'phone. But at least the wait time when making a call has dropped to almost nothing, which is an improvement.

Quite a few years ago, my bank introduced a new version of its automated telephone banking service, which would "enhance my experience".

I wrote to them (yes it was a few years ago!) saying that this enhanced experience in practice meant that I would no longer be able to do some things that I found very useful and able to do nothing new that I could not do now, so not much of an enhancement.

I got a properly written reply apologising: sorry, that's correct, but that's how it is.

nib

Just like all the Consultations held but ignored. The moving of our local Main Post Office, the huge Pylons planned to go from Norwich to Tilbury. All consulted on, the overall peoples' desire clear, but ignored. The decision has already been made.