You Want Free Fries With That?
Oct 2005
Having now moved to a telephone and internet bank, CSR is having to deal with that most difficult of customer: The IFA. The IFA is an independant financial adviser, who finds, places and arranges a mortgage for their clients.

IFAs always want the world. It's not unreasonable, they get paid only if the case is placed. However, we were starting to feel like a doormat. IFAs were coming to us for credit checks on their clients, because we asked for only a few details before doing the credit search. The company found that cases were being placed for the search, then never came back. Not only was this costing us money, but it was clogging our system with dead cases.

So we changed our system, so that more questions were asked before the credit search. You should have heard the complaints we had the first week after we changed over. It was like we'd shot their puppy.

Customer: "But you never asked for this information on Friday!"

Me: "Yeah, well things change. Get used to it."