A business keen to be the enemy of their customers.

I only give one star because this particular platform does not seem to allow for anything less... a pity as it skews the data to make companies appear to be better than they are.

For the last four months, I have been harassed by Standard Bank, averaging some four calls a day, five days a week, and on Saturdays, only three calls, primarily due to the shorter working hours.

Roughly half the time, a human being speaks to me; a quarter of the time, I get a very threatening recorded message, the last 1/4, they just hang up.

The irritation is that these calls are unsolicited. I have not been a Standard Bank Customer for at least 18 years now, though my company does make use of them. Furthermore, Standard Bank is attempting to call a different person, unrelated to me, on a number that I have used for the last 17 years but is owned by my company.

This causes a particular problem for Standard Bank, as I cannot possibly pass the identification check as I do not know the ID number, residential address, or email address of this person, and yet they refuse to put a senior manager on this case to help in resolving it.

Calling the complaints department of Standard Bank does not yield any satisfactory results. I have a reference number: 70******91, for the one time that I managed to get the person on the other end to understand that this is a serious matter. They not only listened to me but guaranteed me that my number was now decoupled from the case at hand.

I also managed to track down the person they were trying to reach, using no more than the first and last name of this person and that of their spouse, all information provided by Standard Bank in their attempts to identify me as said person. How can it be that a normal person such as I can manage this while an organization with Standard Banks resources utterly failed to do the same?

This person provided me with feedback that they had indeed updated their records with Standard Bank, and yet, since then, I have had no less than 25 further calls from Standard bank.

It seems that the weakness with Standard Bank is Administrative Overburden. I have now waited three months for A****a Som****a to get back to me, a manager. I am awaiting Bo***i Z***u to call me back - a manager, and now for L***e N***i to get back to me, also a manager, though, in her defense, she only got flagged today.

But, on the topic of managers, here is the question - is Standard Bank in trouble, or do I have the worst luck in the world? I understand that Managers must have meetings, and sometimes their managers must have meetings with them too. However, from my perspective, I cannot fathom how a section's manager can be meeting with their own manager, who is also meeting with their manager for more than 1 hour. That is no longer a meeting; that is a crisis meeting. And you would think that perhaps the next management level is available then... going up five levels from the entry-level of the call center - and yet, they too are unavailable.

And for how long are these managers in these meetings? 1 hour, 2 hours, or, as indicated previously, two to three months? A full-day meeting is a strategic meeting. A one-week meeting is a crisis meeting. A month-long meeting is a disaster recovery meeting, surely?

Or, is the problem simply that Standard Bank management is not customer-focused but KPI-oriented, keener on being seen than supporting their customers?