Dear Barclays Product / Tech / UX / Marketing team – if you’re reading this …

[cmcp]

Do better.

[Maples]

This adds nothing to the situation if you’re not willing to suggest ideas.

[R76]

It was funny though!

But, sure. Dear Dear Barclays Product / Tech / UX / Marketing team – if you’re reading this, and I’m sure at least some of you are…

(1) Internalise the fact that the execution of this offer has actively *damaged* relations with a significant number of new and existing customers – the very ones you were trying to attract or upsell. Fortunately, these customers are likely going to hang around for 4 months to get the promised bonuses, so you have some time to try to fix it. But if you just breathe a sigh of relief and don’t do anything more, you won’t retain any of those customers and the whole thing will have turned out to be an expensive disaster.

(2) Offer a meaningful apology, i.e. not just £50 compensation for the inconvenience but something that suggests you understand how badly you’ve done and are working to fix it.

(3) For God’s sake, fix the app bug which means that if *anything* goes wrong, it wrongly tells customers that ID verification has failed. That alone is putting extra pressure on systems which simply can’t cope with it, notably your branch network. Fixing bugs takes time, so in the meantime brief your telephone support people not to trust that message, and to investigate the situation before telling callers they have to go into a branch.

(4) Before you ever consider running an offer as complex as this one again, get some outside QA resource to help you think through all the possible combinations and edge cases.

These are all practical things that should be within the reach of even a legacy bank like Barclays. (That’s not intended as a burn. Legacy banks have incredibly complex IT systems, and there are very good reasons why it’s hard to achieve change. I’ve been there!)

I’d be more than happy to provide further suggestions charged at my normal day rate 😉

[cinereus]

(5) If issues are identified with particular permutations, make sure staff are informed about this so the troubleshooting doesn’t need to start again at week 0 for every other customer with the same issue.

[Dave1234]

This whole experience is a disaster. I really hope those who have promoted this offer through this website are passing feedback to Barclays and all parties involved realise how stressful it has been for many users of this website and existing/future and potential customers of Barclays. It’s damaging for all involved.

[ChrisMc]

1. Test and bug fix your onboarding flows more rigorously with common case scenarios – that buys you a bit of time as you can bug fix emerging issues and edge cases as they arise, not firefight onboarding issues at scale.

2. Remember that in a commoditised market that is used to ‘free’, products that command a fee need to deliver what is promised by them, Broken functionality isn’t acceptable when your customer is paying a premium for the service.

3. Thank your frontline teams for taking the heat, and resolve to shield them more effectively from your lack of testing on your next product release – you owe them.

4. Reassess what minimum viability means – not from the business’ perspective of opening an account. Focus on the viability of the product experience and don’t ship until you can meet your promises to clients in at least 80 per cent of cases.

Writing as someone who:

– has spent around 9 hours on the phone to various parts of Barclays to be able to login using the Barclaycard app
– still gets regular online declines as unable to authenticate Mastercard 3D Secure, 5 months in
– is getting promotional emails re instalment offers, which aren’t actually available
– has no visibility of Avios in-app on the Barclaycard side, and no-one can understand why
– is somehow still paying £20 per month for this and increasingly wondering why

[cmcp]

Maples wrote:

This adds nothing to the situation if you’re not willing to suggest ideas.

See above

[John]

cmcp wrote:

See above

Oh so you just wanted for others to do the work for you 😉

[Carlos]

Find them on linkedin

[ClubSmed]

I received an email request yesterday from Barclays asking for my feedback on opening my Premier account, so I took the time to respond and detail exactly what the experience was like…

[RebeccaLondon]

ClubSmed wrote:

I received an email request yesterday from Barclays asking for my feedback on opening my Premier account, so I took the time to respond and detail exactly what the experience was like…

I recieved this too but the link didn’t work.

Fitting.

[ms]

I am astound by how bad the Barclays Product is. How can you get so many things wrong!?

[Bluebirdnick]

ms wrote:

I am astound by how bad the Barclays Product is. How can you get so many things wrong!?

I sort-of agree. I managed to get me and the wife through to qualify for this. We started on Sunday, it ended this evening. It is a bit bonkers that I’m pleased that we managed it really – these sorts of things should take minutes to set up. Barclays IT is just woeful. HOWEVER, their CS has been really good and really responsive, and for the sake of a few hours work we’ve bagged £2k worth of avios. I used to work for Barclays so some of the issues with multiple customer IDs etc were half-expected, but the level of CS has been genuinely impressive. I am minded to stick with them even after the 4 month period to see how they do.

But yeah, there is was a hell of a lot of incompetence on display in the execution of this promotion.

[WaynedP]

Some hugely insightful and valuable feedback posted freely here – of the type that some companies have been known to pay eye-watering sums by commissioning expensive surveys or appointing extortionate management consultants.

It would be colossally remiss of Barclays not to have a very senior exec take a very careful and cogitative read of these comments.

[spellman]

Agree with the feedback posted above. The whole process has been a horrible painful disaster from start to finish (and it’s not finished yet) – and I was actually a pretty happy Barclays customer before all of this!

From getting a crazy £250 credit limit on the card which took weeks to challenge, to being sent in circles trying to open the Premier account, couldn’t do it on the app, told to call a number, call the number, the line has a prerecorded message says its no longer active and to use the app!, and finally being locked out of my main Barclays banking app and had to bring ID into a branch, despite Barclays knowing who I was for the past twenty years because my mortgage is with them!

I’m very tempted to close everything Barclays related once (if?) the 100k Avios ever post and take my business elsewhere.

[TooPoorToBeHere]

Yup I’m another one. The IT/app/website side of getting the avios card setup some months ago was really bad, but adding the Premier account was beyond farcical. Hours on the phone – as noted by others above, people very friendly and trying hard to help, but systems and processes terribly broken. If I couldn’t leave the phone on the desk and carry on working while on-hold, it wouldn’t be worth the hassle.

I’ll continue to take their money if they’re going to throw it around like this, but I wouldn’t dream of trying to use a Barclays product or service other than to exploit their marketing spend. Everything inside Barclays seems to be broken and my level of trust in their ability to deliver a reliable service is zero. The idea of being reliant on them to have my mortgage paid or buy groceries makes me feel ill.

Symptomatic of a wider decline in British institutions – individual staff members often trying hard, but the whole thing coming to pieces and increasingly unable to perform its basic functions?

[johnwillis1986]

I also got the “ID verification has failed message”, called Barclays as prompted by the app and they said to go into the local branch, the earliest appointment available at my local was end of Feb 2023!

Another representative said uninstall and reinstall the app which i did. I now have 2 live current accounts and 1 credit card account, none of which are linked…. How does this bank get it so hilariously wrong at every opportunity!?

I think the Avios offer was so generous as they realise most people are aware of how much of a joke this bank is and it needed to be enough to still persuade people to move.

A friend of mine used to bank with them, he had his card stolen so he rang Barclay’s fraud team to report it and get it cancelled. They asked him four times to read out the long card number on the front of the card… he patiently had to explain four times that his card was stolen so he could not read out the front. They are hopeless. I will be binning them off entirely when the bonus comes through.

[JDB]

Clearly a number of people have had issues, but the numbers are relatively small compared to the numbers whose application process has been smooth. It was exactly the same when the Avios cards were launched. Some complaints about refusals and application problems, but most fine. The bad news always drowns out the routine.

The reality is that the IT and general processes of the legacy banks is generally pretty poor. Barclays is no better and no worse than the others.

[Cranzle]

JDB wrote:

Clearly a number of people have had issues, but the numbers are relatively small compared to the numbers whose application process has been smooth. It was exactly the same when the Avios cards were launched. Some complaints about refusals and application problems, but most fine. The bad news always drowns out the routine.

The reality is that the IT and general processes of the legacy banks is generally pretty poor. Barclays is no better and no worse than the others.

Agree. Trustpilot ratings indicate all the big banks are equally bad.