As much as lovingly crafted prose can help in some situations (like say, I had a terminal illness or my child was missing) I find it hard to believe that good writing would be enough to sway an admin assistant to give me better treatment than the 10,000 other complaints they were dealing with. Especially when most of them are about something as dull as PPI.
I’d definitely be doing that for a small bank like Monzo, where they don’t have scripted phone procedures, fixed targets for handling calls and correspondence, but in a Barclays call centre, it seems unlikely it would produce any better outcome than a form letter.
I agree with you on the one hand, talking to individuals about individual feelings is inportant. Especially important for small businesses. But like you said, 2/3s of the complaints were upheld.
That’s thousands and thousands of policies. At some point you need to start treating it as a systemic problem instead of pretending it’s just one bad apple. The cart is overflowing.
I presume you work in financial services and are seeing it from that point of view?
From a consumer point of view, whether it’s a template letter, a web form, or a very personal from the heart confessional, it doesn’t feel like the outcome would be very different.
A bit like when years ago, I begged NatWest in person to stop charging me fees on my unplanned overdraft which had gone £50 overdrawn. “Computer says no” was their answer to making it an authorised one, and I didn’t manage to pay it off until it reached £850. That was some years ago, and would not be possible now given the fee charging limits they are now forced to keep to by legislation.
When it’s taken years, countless law changes and many court cases to force banks to act fairly, please execute my skeptism that writing a nicely written letter will have a positive result for the average customer.