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Stephen Rodwell

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Review of the Santander, Business Current Account:

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Horrendous customer service

Echoing what a lot of people have said here, the customer service is truly terrible. Avoid starting a business account with Santander at all costs! I have no idea how any business properly functions using it. We (foolishly) decided to do the simple action of adding another signatory to our bank a couple of months ago. Since then, our transactions - even if they're standard ones that we always pay - are regularly flagged as security issues, meaning that our online banking access gets blocked. So, you ring up the customer service number and it takes (no exaggeration) roughly 1 hour each time to complete the call. This happens probably every ~2 days at the moment. I asked Santander at one point how long it would be before our account stops getting flagged for security issues and they recognise the new signatory and they said it would be soon but they couldn't tell me exactly how long "for security reasons" (you can't make it up!). The maddest thing is that we sometimes send £90K+ payments and nothing gets flagged, and then a £300 card payment to Dropbox etc. will get flagged and block us out. The worst situation happened about a month ago when our online banking access was blocked and we were told we had to go into a local branch to get it unblocked. I went to the branch, got it unblocked (after about an hour), only to return back to the office to see that the block hadn't been properly lifted. I then called up again (another hour), and the person told me that they thought our online banking details had been accidentally deleted. She said she would send us new online banking details in the post which would take 5-7 days!! In the meantime, all we could do was make all our payments over the telephone, which was an absolute nightmare. I didn't care about complaining because what's the point, but a member of the complaints team contacted me anyway and we chatted through the issue briefly. After a few days I got a letter in the post from them saying that "After investigating the issue, we have come the conclusion that the problem was not the fault of Santander". Honestly. On another occasion, it was insisted that we had to go into branch again to get the bank unblocked. The person I spoke to was super rude about it and wouldn't allow us to unblock our account over the phone. So, I just hung up the phone, called again, spoke to someone else and they cleared up the issue instantly! I could go on and on with similar examples where no two people at Santander say the same thing or know the same things; they are completely incompetent. The only awards that Santander should win: - Longest wait times for a customer service team - Number of times they'll block you out of your own account - Most annoying "on hold" music of all time (honestly, I could sing this tune in my sleep). We'll be moving to another bank shortly and can't wait! Reviewed on: 28th July 2022

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