Since the birth of our son a number of family and friends have given us presents for him, often clothes, but sometimes money, so we’d decided to open a bank account for him. We intend to deposit into the account the money he has recieved along with future money he may recieve for birthdays and Christmas, until he is old enough to make use of it himself. We chose to use Lloyds TSB simply because we’re already customers and they have a branch in our town.

My wife initially talked to them and they informed her that we would need to make an appointment nearly a week later to see someone to open the account, so she made the appointment, however when we turned up it was clear that we were the only ones that knew about the appointment so we were kept waiting for several minutes as they sorted themselves out.

Once we sat down to begin the process it was rapidly clear that the “customer service” from Lloyds TSB was only going to get worse. As the customer service representative attending to us had not been aware of the appointment (they had given us a computer generated letter of confirmation so I can only assume she had not checked the diary) she had not done any preparation and rapidly found they did not have all the right paperwork in the branch. Most importantly not a single copy of the Terms and Conditions of the account - yet I was still expected to sign a form saying I had read and accepted the terms and conditions. Not to be deterred she tried to convince me that the sales blurb for the account (that she printed off the website) was the terms and conditions. My wife believes that the customer service representative was not deliberately trying to deceive me, but that she didn’t understand the difference. Frankly I’m not sure which is worse!

She failed to use any initiative to resolve the problem and was rather at a loss for what to do until I suggested getting a copy faxed from another branch - but she should have been resolving the issues and trying to appease me, not relying on me to identify and them resolve the issues.

Eventually, and after making it clear to the manager of the branch that their service was appalling we got the account open. So why am I still a Lloyds TSB customer? Simply put I’ve tried the other banks and have been appalled at the level of service from each of them, I stick with Lloyds purely because they have a branch within walking distance.

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