FNB chat support problems

FNB has blamed a decline in service quality on its Secure Chat feature on “intermittent” incidents during an upgrade of the system, necessitated by increased user demand.

In the past few weeks, MyBroadband has observed numerous complaints on social media platforms like X/Twitter about Secure Chat’s quality of service being poor.

“Something is terribly wrong with FNB. Your Secure Chat staff is painfully incompetent and is of no assistance to us,” one user posted.

“FNB needs to go back to giving Private Clients bankers because I cannot stand their Secure Chat service suite,” a second stated.

“Please get someone to call me. I am done with your call centres. I am also done with your Secure Chats. It is a waste of my time,” another said.

Several MyBroadband readers have also experienced issues with Secure Chat in recent weeks.

Among the problems is that the system often fails to detect when a customer has already replied to an agent.

If the customer does not respond again within five minutes, they are disconnected from the Secure Chat agent and have to restart the conversation.

In certain cases, they may be placed at the back of a queue as more people have made requests for assistance.

Fortunately, one recent improvement has been that service advisors look at the chat history before asking the customer about their issue.

In the past, users often had to explain their issue from the start if they were disconnected, either through their own failure to respond or a problem on the service advisor’s end.

FNB retail chief operating officer Lee-Anne van Zyl acknowledged “some intermittent issues” were experienced while FNB transitioned to an upgraded and improved Secure Chat system.

Van Zyl explained that the bank had seen more customers opting for chat engagement over voice support.

“With the positive uptake on this channel and increased volumes, we are continuously making enhancements as part of our digital journey to improve the customer experience as we scale the solution,” Van Zyl said.

Van Zyl said the bank was committed to ensuring that any aspect of the platform functionality that could potentially impact customers was investigated and resolved as soon as possible.

“We pay close attention to feedback on the channel and through other platforms, such as social media, to ensure we are solving issues in real time,” she stated.

Van Zyl said that ongoing enhancements and monitoring of the system had improved stability and resulted in a positive improvement in customer experience and feedback.

“Our experience ratings now show that the majority of our customers are rating their experience as high, and we continue to track customer satisfaction and overall service levels on this platform to ensure these remain within our service benchmarks.”

“Regular health checks are conducted on the platform to monitor the performance of the solution and we are seeing high availability.”

In addition, FNB performs quality evaluations of all interactions across all advisors in its contact centres. The bank said this ensures its agents can effectively resolve customer queries.

Many years-long FNB customers believe one reason the service quality on Secure Chat has declined is that the bank has lowered the bar for support agents on the platform.

When FNB initially launched Secure Chat in 2016, it promoted the service as enabling Premier and Private customers to enquire about services or send instructions to their “private banking team”.

That suggested that the service was manned by select financial professionals.

FNB still promotes the service as allowing people to chat with a “team of bankers” but many of the advisors seem to be general customer service staff.

Customers are often transferred to specific departments if a query is highly specialised.

Van Zyl said advisors were trained and well-qualified individuals who completed Secure Chat’s onboarding and technical training prior to the system’s launch.

“Advisors also have access to training materials, guiding them to efficiently interact with customers and regular coaching interventions are conducted to address any areas of improvement that may be required,” Van Zyl said.

“Skills development and ongoing training are linked to an advisor’s performance metrics and are regularly reviewed.”

She did not elaborate on how long it took to train the advisor or what type of qualifications the bank required.