Utterly disappointing service by Nedbank Home Loans

Yesterday morning I called to extend the notice on a loan and was informed that I cannot do so even though the notice expires in less than a month. I asked for written confirmation that no penalties would apply if I give notice after the expiry period given that I’m in the process of selling my property.

I also asked for a copy of my original contract to obtain the correct property details for an OTP that I’d like to give to a prospective buyer.

Now, these are IMHO rather simple requests and I was on the line for 10 minutes before I asked whether the person helping me could call me back, which she did. However, I was on the call for a further 15 minutes and then asked if I can leave it with her to just e-mail me the required documentation.

I still haven’t received anything. The lady mentioned that her system was slow. In this day and age I expect better from a bank servicing many hundreds of thousands of customers. When providing my e-mail address the representative also, by all accounts, was not aware of the phonetic alphabet. This is something folks handling calls should know so-as to avoid spelling mistakes.

Today I tried again and the person helping me could not authenticate to my phone as the notification simply never arrived, so another system failure. I was then transfered to "manual" authentication and the voice message mentioned that manual authentication is no longer done. Anyway, I waited another 13 minutes and then just gave up.

I'll see if I can just get an attorney to do this for me tomorrow.

It is utterly disappointing that one of the big four banks in SA is incapable of providing a simple service. I guess this is the kind of service we should be getting used to :(