I went to Osuuspankki today to close my bank account I had to open for my motorcycle loan a few years back. Since then, a friend working at Nordea managed to get me a better loan with a slimmer margin and I switched back to Nordea, making my OP account obsolete.

I received a letter from Osuuspankki earlier this week stating that I had crossed my balance by 11,40‚Ǩ due to direct debits from my account due to the web access to my account. (I don’t even want to get started on this, but who in the world creates a commercial product and thus a barrier of entry of a service that should be taken for granted and used as a marketing platform to further create benefit for customers and thus revenue for your company? It is a big business I know, but nevertheless.) I paid the amount I owed to the bank and went to the office to close my account.

The lovely lady at the desk told me I have 5 euros worth of service charges I need to pay before I can close the account. I asked her if I could pay them right there to speed things up. “Certainly, do you have any cash?” Of course I don’t, I’m all about cards and seldom have any cash on me. Furthermore, I couldn’t “pay” the amount with my Nordea card since they aren’t a store that can charge cards so easily. I would have had to go out to the ATM to get some money, walk back in to “pay” the amount due. I even offered to pay the amount by directly transferring 5 euros from my Nordea account with my mobile, but it doesn’t help since the cross-bank transfers take 2 nights to go through (yet another big business to get interest on overnight deposits to the Bank of Finland). Another totally “useless” illogicality that makes customers’ lifes difficult.

She asked me to pay the 5 euros and come back next week.

Ok, now hands up those who see any logic in this? I know it’s good to create obstacles so customers don’t leave you per se, but this is pretty ridiculous. This is what you get when you have stiff processes that you tie your customers to and make their life unnecessarily difficult.

I’m not very fond of the way they treated me, but I’m sure other banks would have made me go through the same procedure. Isn’t there seriously any interest in the management teams of these banks to honestly improve customer experience?