Queueing for buses

Another rail strike and more long queues for buses. What is it with all the black? Thankfully, at least one person was prepared to colour coordinate.

I've not had reason to deal with NatWest for a while. The day came today when I was reminded that I had to complete a business profile for the account. I'd ignored it for a while as I'd not been able to login, but the deadline was actually today and I had no choice but to jump through all the necessary hoops to get access. Apparently, it's an anti-money laundering exercise. The account was going to get frozen if the form wasn't completed today.

I did finally get access to the form. It wasn't complicated, just a few check boxes and completing names and addresses. It should have been a two minute job. Two hours and a brain meltdown later, I had to give up. It was impossible to finish. It kept telling me that vital information was missing without pointing out what. I kid you not, it looked like a bit of software written by a kid for a school project. It's without doubt the worst bit of interface design I've ever seen in my life. It beggars belief that this is from a company making billions of pounds of profit.

The only good thing is that there is a dedicated business profile team. It's always been easy to get through to talk to someone about the problems. Everyone I've spoken to says it's bad and have been unable to help me complete the form. At least I managed to negotiate a stay of execution. But it's not the most sensible of business models, though, is it? Get a kid to design the software for a bit of pocket money and then employ thousands of people in a call centre to handle all the problems!