We can’t resist overpaying celebrities but struggle to invest in customers

Companies will pay over the odds for celebrity involvement, but they seem to be failing to meet customer demands. This shouldn’t be the case, writes Caroline Bullock

Ubiquitous presenting duo Ant and Dec are being paid around £2m to advertise banking giant Santander (Getty)

Apparently, ubiquitous presenting duo Ant and Dec are being paid around £2m to advertise banking giant Santander, an interesting revelation in a week in which we learnt that its remaining branches would be closing earlier on weekdays and Saturdays.

It’s reflective of some skewed priorities in a society that can’t resist overpaying celebrities while struggling to invest in the paying customer. Because whatever spin is put on it, the gradual erosion of face to face customer service, and the removal of choice that comes with it, fails the public, particularly when the requirement to use digital services can still be prohibitive to many. The banks argue that they’re simply responding to demand – though I’m not convinced the appetite is as universal as the rhetoric implies.

As bricks and mortar alternatives disappear, isn’t everyone having to “go digital” by default over preference? Customers are railroaded into alignment with an agenda that brings cost efficiencies and faster market penetration for the business – things that, incidentally, are rarely passed onto the consumer, as those assigned to a call queue by a chatbot will testify.

I’ve written extensively on business digitalisation. Articulating the breathless patter of many a retail and banking giant’s chief technology officer means entering a world that revolves around customer data and analytics – the relentless pursuit of audience insight to better understand users’ behaviours and preferences, from how they are accessing a company’s website to real-time browsing information.

The theory is that having this information collated and accessible, and responding accordingly with tailored interventions, results in a personalised customer experience that builds loyalty and competitive advantage. In some cases it does, but there is still a significant disconnect between the genuine innovation that flourishes when a digital offering is aligned to the target market and the all too often generic, automated reality, which makes our custom feel entirely disposable rather than valued.

I should at this point clarify that, as a Halifax customer, I’m in no hurry to go into a branch, but I do expect and deserve a choice. The nearest one is some 20 miles away – a telling antidote to the bank’s current ad campaign, which oddly portrays its bricks-and-mortar premises as being at the heart of communities, when they’re becoming as rare as hens’ teeth.

My lasting memories of the in-branch experience, some time before Covid, are of queues, not enough staff, and tedious hard sell to switch accounts, with the usual paltry interest rate exalted as an incentive. Of course, what they really wanted was for everyone to go online so they didn’t have to deal with anyone – so all around me, people who had presumably come into the branch through choice, perhaps because it best suited them, were being asked if they had “ever considered online banking”, as though the internet had just been invented.

One new addition involved a staff member, untethered from the counter, manning the door: a sort of amiable bouncer/meet and greeter, checking to see if there was anything they could help with to avoid you having to queue, before directing you to the queue. A cashier refused to print out my latest statement because they “don’t do that anymore”, and all in all it was pretty standard mass-market service for a mass market; but then, perhaps it was more a reflection of the lower investment and priority given to a branch on the hit list anyway.

My interactions are now by phone, where inefficiencies are as rife but just different. If you call with a couple of issues, you can’t be transferred to another department: you must ring back and wait in a queue again. The voice-recognition security that never recognises my voice is a particular drain on time and patience; a process designed to bypass the lengthier, involved security checks only draws them out further.

Interestingly, when I tried to order a new paying-in book – a request so exotic that the person on the other end was briefly stunned into silence – I was asked to repeat it twice more before a cheque book arrived a fortnight later. When I called again about the error, I discovered I had to go into the branch to collect the thing I’d wanted – confirmation that the physical facet of these businesses is not entirely redundant.

Yet I don’t think pitching digital services against bricks and mortar can continue to be framed simply as a black and white choice for consumers: that they will either need to adopt the new systems or face being left behind. The implications are broader and more serious. The loss, increasingly normalised in professional services, of face to face interaction is filtering through in more oblique ways, giving fuel to the idea of an anonymous and detached way of dealing with people as something mainstream and presumably justifiable, when the situation is entirely inappropriate.

The battle people are still having to see a doctor, many months after the rest of life resumed post-Covid, is a case in point. Reducing something as important as an individual’s health to a rushed phone call would once have been an unthinkable scenario, yet now, in spite of the intermittent flare-ups in publicity when a condition is missed and someone is failed, the practice continues.

Meanwhile, we have witnessed the P&O Ferries mass sacking via video link debacle. Situations that professionally and ethically demand a more human touch are being subsumed into approaches that ultimately make them easier for the messenger, but far more brutal for the recipient.