Ordinary Gweilo

I may have given the impression that I thought that HSBC’s new automated queuing system was a good idea. I apologize for this – I was wrong.

I went to the bank today and picked up my ticket with its promise that I would probably have to wait 6 minutes. As they were currently serving ticket number 107 and I had number 109 I thought was probably a slightly high estimate. What I hadn’t figured on was that the holder of ticket number 108 would be paying in 50 cheques into 50 different accounts and discussing the full range of services available from the bank.

You might think that the beauty of an automated queuing system is that it doesn’t really matter if it takes a long time to serve one customer because you have the flexibility of allocating customers to any counter (rather than having 3 or 4 different physical queues each with allocated counters). However, it seems that HSBC’s system is not that sophisticated, and so I really did have to wait for the woman with 50 cheques before I got served (some 25 minutes).

Or perhaps the system does have some flexibility but no-one was monitoring it, because while I was being served I was amazed to see that they called the holder of ticket number 110 to another counter.

Whatever it was that went wrong, no-one apologized for the problem. If they’d had a single queue I might have had to wait 20 minutes, and making me wait longer than that was very poor customer service.