User experience

A frustration post. Halifax, in their wisdom, have recently upgraded one of our accounts, an upgrade which appears to involve dumping the account history - although, to be fair, they have preserved the stuff needed to carry the account forwards. Backwards is the problem.

Next stop online banking to have another go at finding the history. Failed.

Try the chat box. Dismal failure. Whatever is at the other end of the chat box is very dim compared with the Microsoft or Google offerings.

Try phoning them up. Fight my way over the security hurdles. Eventually get to a person. But a person who is not prepared to talk with me about these accounts and their history in general and is certainly not going to talk with me about this account in particular as it is not in my name. The nominal account holder is out, possibly having to do battle with a checkout computer at Sainsbury's - although she does go to some lengths to avoid having to do this. She prefers talking to people.

So, so far, failure all round. I shall see if I can get any sense out of someone in the branch in the Ashley Centre - but I am not hopeful.

PS: some hours later: I have now been down to Halifax. Wandered in to find two advisors already attending to customers. I was just settling down to wait when a third advisor appeared, an advisor who had been in the business long enough to get to the bottom of my problem in no time at all. So passbook accounts don't have statements as such at all, the passbook is the statement. When such accounts were abolished, earlier this year, all the back data became inaccessible online. The story was to be found in the passbook. However, in the case that the passbook was not up to date, which it probably was not in our case, you could apply to get a print of past data, which would have to be retrieved from the archive and which might take a week or so. No, I could not fire this up, but if BH was to present herself with her passbook and driving license it could all be set in motion. So while this may not have been the cleverest upgrade from the customer point of view, this advisor at least could sort me out. I left much better pleased with Halifax than I had been when I first posted this.