Pathetic Service ABSA Church Street Pietermaritzburg

Today I went to ABSA to do a transfer from a club account to another account held at another Bank. To say the teller was slow would be an understatement. At approximately 14:00 I and my fellow signatory on the account approached her window to transact.

It was a good few minutes before she acknowledged us because she was busy whacking away on her keyboard. Once she paid attention to us she asked us what our business was, she then proceeded to start the process. We gave her our ID's and after a few minutes she asked for our account number to transfer from. We gave her the number and immediately thereafter she requested the account number to transfer to.

Upon learning it was going to another bank she proceeded to request a BANK STATEMENT for the third party the money is going to. She said that's the rule. A blatant lie if you ask me. Why would you request third party bank statements? How are we to have third party statements if we are making payments to them?

Luckily for us we were able to get a bank confirmation letter from the payee. She proceeded to work on her keyboard for a while. I won't say it was a few minutes because when we checked the time it was approaching 25 minutes since the process began. After giving her the amount to be transferred she proceeded to call her manager for whom we waited for more than 5 minutes.

What irks me more is that the manager was on the floor, we could see her. The bank was empty, only a couple of customers scattered all over. She shouldn't have taken forever to come over.

When she arrived she did her checks and then eventually told us that we can't do the transfer because our account was locked. The signatories needed to update their records. She also told us that numerous SMS's were sent to us to request that we come to the bank to update our details

The number they used for communication belongs to a deceased former signatory to the account. This signatory, immediately after his death when we came to report of his death and also do some transactions, we were told that his records no longer appear on our account profile. We asked who could have reported his death and have him removed from the profile, whoever was helping us that day said there's just no record of him anymore, there were only two signatories remaining on the account. That was almost 2 years ago. Today to be told that the bank has been sending his communication to get us to update our details, I find it utterly confusing.

And to top it off, we were told that the ID's we produced were not on the system. It's the ID cards, account was opened with ID books; however we have been using the same ID cards repeatedly to do the transfers before without any hassles.

Almost three quarters of an hour was wasted on something that could have been picked up within five minutes. When we came to do the transfer, the teller could have checked on the system the status of the account which at a glance could have informed her the account had a hold status on it; checked the notes for any important info to help her process the transaction and also some info on the conduct of the account. What was she pretending to be busy with if she couldn't get an overview of the account before making us waste so much time in her window?

ABSA didn't just drop the ball here, after dropping they kicked it so far away they made sure not to recover from this breakdown of service. One word comes to mind, APATHY