IT WASN’T that long ago that banking used to be something of a cross between penitence and torture.
Oh, was I being too extreme in my characterization of the experience? OK then, I take away the redemptive quality and just say it was something not too far removed from inhumane torture.
How so?
Well, imagine having to stand in a queue for sometimes hours on end, just to hand in a slip to one of the tellers, be told to take your seat again, and then have to wait for who knows how long, for your transaction to be processed. Whenever I think about it now, I can’t help but recoil in horror. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, it seems, is not confined only to those who have been through the horrific experience of war. Banking transactions count somewhere in there, too.
Banking chores for me had become as welcome as having my teeth pulled that when it became possible not to have to pay your unfriendly neighborhood bank a visit to do the most mundane of tasks, I was one of the early adopters. And yet, when I returned home to the Philippines a few years ago now, I realized that one could never really get away from “personal banking,” however hard one tried.
But just the fact that for a number of basic transactions, I no longer had to bear the scowl of a harassed teller was enough of a victory for me. And so it was that for as long as I could manage, I would never set foot in a bank ever again. Internet banking, phone banking, whatever it was as long as it meant not having to get inside a bank, I was in for it. No more banks, no more torture, I say.
The thing, however, with dealing with machines is that once in a while they fail. And when that happens, you really need a human to step in and sort out things. Because machines, however wonderful they are in stripping out the agonizing human interactions, are not good at all in sorting out their mistakes by themselves.
The problem is that as banks involved machines more and more in simple transactions, sorting out simple errors became less and less simple. Case in point is something that I am still frustratingly trying to solve as of this writing.
My friendly neighborhood BPI has very wisely provided automated payment services for many transactions, including paying my credit card bills to my friendly neighborhood Citibank. For years now, I did not have to visit any of these places – much to my relief, given my PTSD-inducing experiences with personal banking. The problem is, one of the machines tasked with paying my bills without human interaction failed this time around. My money disappeared quite conveniently from my account when I made the payment, but more than two weeks hence, it never made it yet to my credit card account.
Frustrating calls and many handwringing conversations later with both banks, and they still have not figured out why the money never found its way to its destination.
And so it appears that with all the advantages that machine-machine banking presents in terms of avoiding all those aggravating human interactions, there are times after all that intelligent human intervention is still necessary. For example, when machines forget to send your money to the right place.
Which, of course, is where the problem starts. Because as people are less and less involved with banking transactions, the ones that still are apparently are less and less equipped to do so. Call centre agents have replaced real bank officers, who actually knew what they were doing.
Which brings me back to my original dilemma, which I thought technology had solved quite conveniently. No, I don’t want to have to talk to people when I need the simplest of banking transactions done. But yes, I do want to speak to someone intelligent, whenever the convenient but brainless machines fail to do their simplest of tasks.
(Happy Fathers’ Day greetings to my father, former Commissioner Bernabe S. Batuhan, my father-in-law, Fernando Arguelles, and all our SunStar father-readers.)
(http://asbbforeignexchange.blogspot.com & http://twitter.com/asbbatuhan)