Barclays: uncontactable

There is a trend from large businesses to become uncontactable by customers.  A key element of becoming uncontactable is the "pretend contact web page", in which the business pretends to be contactable.  It is also necessary to ignore letters in the post, including letters by registered post to a company's registered office address.  If a telephone number is given, it should be handled with an automated system, designed to filter out as many callers as possible by sheer frustration.  If it's possible to speak to a person at all, waiting times should be in the hours.  Staff, if they are accidentally exposed to customers, should falsely claim that everything is possible via some "app", "portal", or even "web site".

I've recently seen this from British Airways, an ex airline which stole money from me, and is determined to remain uncontactable.  More on that later.

The latest example is Barclays.  It used to be possible to write to Barclays via online banking.  You went to messages, and chose "New message", and wrote to them.  This was useful.  Now, it is no longer possible.

Rewinding, my original objective was to send a house-sized payment to a conveyancer's client money account, to buy a house in the Sterling area.  My only recent experience sending payments around this size is from Swiss banks.  Here, one might expect a call the next day from a member of staff in a local branch, whom one has met several times in real life, to check the payment was intended, before they approve it.  With Barclays, it's just not allowed, and the limit is a measly 50k (for those reading from the future, this was the order of a year's per-capita income):

Do you like how it's higher than 50k or lower than 1p, in a typical software-developer-authored, which is to say shit, error message?  Is there a spec document somewhere, where this element of the user interface was deliberately defined?  Of course not.  It's an artifact of allowing software "engineer"s adhoc control over interface, when they should have none.  To the mathematical and "smart" mind, bigly and littlely are just special cases of wrong-amountly, so we can be "smart" and "lazy", because we're so "smart".

And please change the amount?  So they think the amount I need to send depends on their software?  How about right, you need to send that amount, here's how you do it.  Who's going to go "oh, I can't send that amount, I'll just change the amount, yeah, that should do it, I wasn't that bothered about the amount in the first place, I just wanted to touch base".

Anyway, I tried the number, and it was phone banking, for which I'm registered.  After engaging for some period with their automated filtering crap, telling you to input this and that, not hearing you, presenting you with voice menus, I ended up in a queue.  The voice said it was over 40 minutes.  That is a lower bound.  They didn't give an upper bound.  I wasn't equipped for a queue of this length, so I hung up.

When I used a Barclays branch in London in May, my comment on exiting was that it was like being in the third world.  I wasn't sure if this was due to it being Barclays or it being in a random part of London, but now we know, either of these would do.

My usual next step is to write to them with the messaging built in to online banking.  And this is where things go from bad to very bad.

The, what do you call it, "user journey", starts normally enough.  There's a link "Messages" in the top bar.  One-click navigation to Messages.

Reassuringly, old threads become visible.  The most recent is from several years ago, but there are some classics in here.  One theme was trying to calibrate the number of paper copies of each statement to one, which you might think a standard number, but I kept ending up with zero copies or two copies.

Another enquiry was to close a business account, some time after an attempt to change its correspondence address to my home in Switzerland.  They had send a plain-text "form" to complete within messaging, which is fair enough, and a good use of the free-form text communication channel.  Nicer than a PDF or Word form.  But my entry of "Switzerland" into a field had become corrupted.  Probably someone shouted it out across the office during a transcription phase.  I became aware of this many months later, when I received a battered paper envelope which had been all the way via Swazliand.  They supposedly needed urgently to contact me.  They had all my contact details, because the business account was linked to me as a person.  But their way to "urgently" contact me was by post to a non-existent Germanic-sounding address in Swaziland.

And yes, people do shout it across the office, as part of normal business processes in big corporations.  That's how my surname, Jones, keeps getting corrupted to things like "Yonas" in German-speaking places.

After this trip down memory lane, I went for "New message", and then things got squidgy:

You have to "explore" the resulting page to confirm it, but it's impossible to get to a screen where you get to actually write your message.

You are given a choice between "Quick actions", "FAQs / Useful links", and "How to contact us".

I confirmed that "Quick actions" really does take you to an attempt to perform that action, rather than documentation on, or messaging about, that action.

"FAQs / Useful links" is pure documentation, as per the psychopath MBA practice of showing the customer documentation instead of allowing them to make contact.

That leaves "How to contact us", which sounds hopeful.  This is divided into "Chat", "Telephone" and "Find your nearest branch".

"Chat", tho, is just a promise that "you'll be able to use our new chat service here soon", and a reference to their "app".  No, it is not okay for your "app" to be the only way to contact your business.

"Telephone" is a different number, presumably for the same telephone banking service.  I could try that again on Monday morning, and see how it goes.

Then there's "Find your nearest branch".  Since I'm not in the UK, it is an option to fly in and visit a branch near to whatever airport, combining two key pieces of the shitfrastructure in a manoeuvre that is thus almost certain to fail, apart from increasing the cost and time of making this payment.

My plan is to try the phone queue on Monday morning, flying to the UK to visit a branch if this doesn't work.

But how can Barclays operate without a way for customers to write arbitrary written enquiries to the bank via online banking?  It's a major regression from the online banking service I experienced in the late 90s, a quarter of a century ago.  We are experiencing a total competence collapse, and it is no longer gradual.