HSBC reviews

extremely stressful no training whatsoever, expected to “give things a go” which is hard when dealing with people’s finances low pay for the amount of work no progression

It’s quite honestly the most soul-destroying job I’ve ever had. I work in a call centre - the building is shared with First Direct. We only currently have half the building - because everyone was working from home, half of the building was closed off. However, HSBC then decided everyone needed to be in the office for 60% of the time - except in Leeds, there aren’t enough desks to accommodate so they’ve kept it at 10% until they can reopen the rest of the building. Quite why we need to be in a physical office is anyone’s guess - the job is perfectly do-able from home, and in fact visiting the office is a pain; it’s noisy, there’s no difference to how we do the work, and it means our carbon footprint goes through the roof, not to mention the cost of fuel. Absolutely ridiculous. I’ve seen team managers on a ZOOM meeting with each other, all sat on separate desks IN THE SAME OFFICE, which is madness! WE DO NOT NEED TO BE IN THE OFFICE FOR THIS JOB. In common with most call centre jobs, the entry-level staff are treated as disposable assets. We are micro-managed to ridiculous levels, whilst being told that development is our responsibility. Managers listen to several calls a month and mark the quality - yes, ‘all your calls are recorded for training a monitoring purposes’. A separate audit team pick a call and do the same. Managers pick some ‘short’ calls to make sure you aren’t deliberately cutting-off customers - quite why you’d do this is anyone’s guess, if people _are_ doing this they might want to ask why, because it just assumes staff are lazy. Which isn’t the case. We’re given a monthly (yes, monthly!) meeting where we discuss our statistics - average handling time, hold time, after-call time, schedule adherence (did we take our breaks/lunches/training at the correct time etc). After-call is the biggest issue - woe betide you don’t go back into ‘ready’ immediately, because _obviously_ you’re slacking off. In fact, the entire management structure seems designed to find fault with everything, and try and catch you out. Indicates a lack of trust, which is usually a sign of bad management in my experience. Team managers seem to be employed for this purpose. They certainly don’t speak to customers. Additionally, adherence to procedures is seen as some sort of God. We use a system called ‘iKnow’ which rarely works properly, is incredibly complicated to follow, but not using it reduces the score if your call is picked up. If you can’t find what you want in the 3000 lines of Ariel-8 text, you have to ask a manager. Assuming they can be bothered getting back to you, it usually feels like you’ve put them out. Some managers are worse than others at displaying their ire that you’ve dared bother them. Being fair, some managers are great, others…not. Any actual ‘tasking’ (ie anything that needs doing that doesn’t involve talking to customers) is usually offshored to somewhere in India. That means that those guys follow a checklist - if they need to check something, they send a message to the customer to call in so we can relay their message and take the 15minutes of abuse. Of course, the messages are often so vague as to be useless, so trying to work out what needs doing is ridiculously complex. Of course, we could do this in our department ourselves and we’d know exactly what is required, but the company would rather save a few quid to employ more auditors to pick fault with our work. We’re basically an answering service for India. Which is crap for us, and even worse for the customers. Probably explains why HSBC are so poor in the customer ratings - that, of course, is our fault as staff - we need extra customer service training. It’s not because the company is a bloated, complex mess. Ever wondered why First Direct (part of HSBC) do so well in the customer service ratings, even though the structure is basically the same? It’s because the company is more simplified, and there’s less to go wrong. It’s easier learning the job if your systems are simpler. HSBC might want to take note. Oh - a special mention for holiday booking. Trying to get a holiday is like picking a fight with lions. The system used breaks up every day in sections. You’ll find some sections have 3 people allowed off, some 2, some 1. So, 6am until 8am may have 3 people allowed, 8 to 8:30am allows 1, 8:30 to 10am, 2 people. So if someone books the day off, it means that the next person can’t, because the half-hour from 8 to 8:30 is now booked up, and you have to practically beg someone for the time off. It’s like this for the whole year. The holiday booking is on a 12 month rolling system - the holiday planner for Feb 2025 is opened in Feb 24, March 25 in March 24 and so on. Means if you like the same time off every year, you often have to log in whilst on holiday to make sure you get in early when they open the next year planner - which is unreasonable. Not that anyone cares, of course - holidays don’t come on the list of ‘important things’. So it’ll never change. In other words, the entire company is a mess which the lower-grade staff get the brunt of. The higher grade staff don’t care - they’re too busy trying to get promoted, which leads to a culture of blaming everyone else and stepping on others to get on. It’s toxic, it’s nasty, and I wouldn’t recommend. Although it’s no worse than any other call centre I’ve worked in, to be fair - call centre work is generally awful, and I have no idea why it has to be so bad. Probably because company directors have never actually done it. We spend a lot of time talking about people’s mental health, without addressing the causes of it in the first place - perhaps if the culture was better, the mental health of the staff would also improve, eh?