I didn’t expect the bank switch to be easy, but I started in January and I’m still at it

So far this ship has not left port and I have some advice if you need to transfer: start now.

As a teenager at Ulster Bank, I started the process in January. I’m still in.

As Minister of Administration in our House, I have a primal fear of debt, so every bill is paid on time, including the credit card. I didn’t expect the switch to be easy, but as a well behaved customer I expected inconvenience, not hassle. But it’s only when you start that you realize what’s going on.

First, you need to be in a good mental place. It’s not a one-off task, but rather a series of administrative fences to be jumped over months. The transition is a marathon, not a sprint.

I simply downloaded the app for my new bank and opened the account. If you don’t have a smartphone and aren’t familiar with apps, this is the first hurdle. Many older people will struggle right there. But banks won’t let customers open accounts at the branch. They are pushed to computers and phones, which some older people just can’t use.

This presents an opportunity for An Post and credit unions who still have local staff in local branches who are well known to older customers and are willing to help them.

Then I applied for a credit card online as my Mastercard is also with Ulster Bank. I was immediately rejected. Outraged that I had my perfect Schufa, I went to a branch of my new bank to find out the problem.

At the front desk I was told, “We don’t lend in the branch.” To me, lending meant a mortgage or a car loan. But credit is credit and cards fall under lending. So I was escorted to a row of phones on a wall to call the call center.

The upside was that I actually got through instead of spending hours on hold at home. The downside was that I had to speak publicly about my personal finances. The lack of privacy hurt deeply. I was mad at the poor guy on the other end of the line and needed to make up with him. How are employees supposed to handle thousands of such calls?

Back home, I began correspondence via a secure email service to further the application. Six weeks later I finally got the card.

That turned out to be the easy part. When you open a new account, banks won’t allow you to apply for an overdraft facility for months. You cannot apply online for six months, in person for three months. I’m still waiting. My account usually went into a small overdraft each month that was quickly cleared as bills were paid and my salary deposited. But without this capability, direct debits would fail and incur terrible fees.

I got around it by putting savings in the new account to act as a buffer. I had the money for it, but a lot of people won’t have it. How do they manage without an overdraft for anything up to six months? It’s insane that the central bank didn’t anticipate this problem and set up some sort of procedure whereby bank overdrafts can be transferred along with a customer’s checking account.

A 40-year solid credit history should count for something. In fact, that was the worst. I was a “good” customer for decades and was now treated like an alien with no history, no records and instead a deeply suspicious character.

Next came direct debits. I trusted the process and filled out an exchange form. The new bank sends these to the old bank and theoretically all direct debits should be converted in one fell swoop. Theoretically. Two of me didn’t and left unpaid. Forget the bill of exchange form and just change your direct debits yourself. That way you know it’s done.

It’s easy to label banks as particularly customer-disdainful, but utility companies, airlines, and those horrible self-checkouts in stores all show that corporate attitudes toward customer service have changed. Companies used to think of service as the jewel in their marketing crown. Now the Ryanair attitude of ‘like’ or ‘lump’ has become the norm. Service is a cost that must be eliminated.

It is no exaggeration to say that this refusal to deal personally with customers inevitably has a dehumanizing effect on society.

If the corporations we deal with keep telling people they don’t matter, sooner or later they will start to believe it.

The customer is no longer king when the trend in almost all industries goes against personal service. Maybe one day Feargal Quinn will be reborn and Ryanair will be deposed as the king of customer scorn.

And someone will cry, “Customer service is dead. Long live customer service.”