Customer Service as an Oxymoron

Six years ago, I blogged about the UK’s National Savings and Investment organisation:

The UK’s National Savings and Investments organisation – those lovely people who run the Premium Bonds – have finally woken up to the fact that it is now the 21st Century. For years, they would only do electronic transfers of prizes or payments to UK bank accounts. If you live overseas, they would send you a crossed warrant. The one time I got one of these, I trotted along to my local bank branch (now closed, for reasons of efficiency) and handed them the crossed warrant. They stared at it with a sense of wonder. Clearly, they’d never ever seen one before. It took them a while to find and fill out the requisite form to deal with it, and charged me for the privilege of doing so.

A few days ago, I received an email from the NS&I proudly announcing that they could now do electronic transfers to international bank accounts.

The reason for that blog post was the bureaucratic hurdles that the NS&I put in the way of getting access to that service. I finally got there and they acknowledged that they would use my Dutch ABN AMRO bank account with my IBAN for electronic transfers.

And the reason for this blog post is that last month I got an email from the NS&I informing me that they would be closing their international payments service from next month:

Er, hello? An “inconvenience”? They must be aware that a non-UK resident cannot open a bank account in the UK, so that suggestion of using a UK bank account is risible. Perhaps they anticipate returning to sending out paper cheques to overseas residents in place of using the international banking system.

I phoned my bank today, only to be told that they no longer process paper cheques – it’s electronic funds transfers only these days. I could hear the incredulity in the voice at the other end of the line – he was doubtless thinking, as I was, that this is now 2020, and we did away with paper and quill pens some time ago…

I really have no recourse but to cash-in my Premium Bonds, and I suspect the majority of other non-UK Bond holders will have to do the same. I have been saving with Premium Bonds since 1964, but not for much longer, and not of my choosing.

So, Ms. Andreana Carrigan, Customer Service Manager – do you see now why I consider the term “Customer Service” to be an oxymoron in your case?

Addendum 22 September 2020: And now the other shoe drops. If you were lucky enough to have a UK bank account before coming to live in the EU – you’re going to lose it by the end of the year. So the NS&I will be losing more than just my custom.

I wrote and complained, and naturally they rejected my complaint.

They took a narrow view (“your complaint is that the International Payment Service is no longer available”), whereas my complaint was threefold:

1. You’ve stopped it.
2. You have offered no viable alternative (a UK bank account is not an alternative for non-UK resident Bond holders) and therefore
3. You have forced me to stop being a customer.

I find it astounding that the UK government’s pension service can happily continue to pay out my UK pension into my Dutch bank account using the Worldlink service, whilst it is seemingly beyond the NS&I’s capability to do so for Premium Bonds.

As I say, I assume that all of us non-UK residents will be forced to cash-in our Premium Bonds as a result, and I wonder how much that will cost the UK Treasury?