Bank of Scotland Internet Banking www.bankofscotland.co.uk

I run two small companies, one established and one quite new. I was disappointed with the hassle of setting up a new account for my new business (same directors, same address etc). It was all very long winded and difficult.

I use the online service daily, and the phone service once or twice a year. Once the account is established, it works very well. Moving money around is easy. 30p per transaction is unwelcome for a small business but not a deal breaker. The online service is occasionally suspended but is nearly always rectified within 24 hours. In essence, the bank gives me what I need - a service that is simple to operate at a price that is acceptable.

This is a review of the Bank of Scotland/Halifax telephone support services. I tried to give a 0 for overall rating, but this is not allowed.

I recently tried to perform a credit transfer from Bank of Scotland to another Bank.

Setting up the payment was not a problem. Trying to transfer funds using this payment was altogther different.

My online account was instantly suspended.

A phone call to the online support helpdesk resulted in being told my account was suspended because I was using a different computer.

Passed on to a 2nd telephone support operator who disagreed with the first operator and gave another excuse. Promised that someone would be in contact within 24hrs to sort the problem. (account still suspended and no money transferred)

Next day there was no contact from BOS but the account came out of suspension and I received a text and an e-mail to confirm. (No mention of why the account was suspended)

Telephoned support to be told that the reason for the suspension was due to my ipaddress changing. When I disagreed with this I was passed on to another operator who disagreed with the first operator. Asked to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor then agreed with the first operator. Asked to speak to someone with knowledge of the security procedures only to be told that they are only available between 7am and 7pm (Previous operators have differing opinions on these timings). Eventually got to speak to a member of the security team who also stated that the ipaddress was the reason for the problem. Not once did anyone I spoke to (now 6 BOS employees) mention the Anti-Fraud system in place for online transactions (I found this out by myself by trawling the BOS website) which will telephone you if there are any out of the ordinary transactions. Unfortunatly the telephone part of the anti-Fraud system did not function correctly and my account was suspended. At the time of writing this review, I am still waiting for the Bank to discover that my account was suspended for this reason.

Overall I found the helpdesk to be woefully undertrained, they have no access to systems that would allow them to deal with customer requests, they are prone to providing generic excuses rather than targeted responses, In summary they are desperatly needeing the services of Mary Portas from the telly to give them an idea of what real customer service is.

Recently switch the BoS from another bank. Found the online service easy to use, like the fact you don't need a card reader to carry out the simplest task!

Excellent service when you phone the helpdesk as well.

Would definitely recommend to others.

The system is down too often.

Ok, I've been with BoS for a long time. It's a basic service and has more or less managed over the last few years. Recently it has really bombed. I have had online services to established accounts disrupted twice over the last two weekends and accessing the Uk based call centre hasn't been easy with dropped calls. Net result, pun intended, I'm moving elsewhere. Bos need to sort out their security software and comms.

The bank of scotland were quite good but since the problems I consider them poor,

Overall I think Bank of Scotland's online banking is quite good - it tells you the balance, what transactions have taken place etc. in an easy to read form. It also gives you an *up to date* available balance unlike some other banks' online services.

Only complaint is it could be a bit nicer looking, in some places it feels as if the designers are stuck in 1999

couldn't understand the bank of scotland 'easy to register' at all as im not an it nerd and a beginner in the computer world so after a few attemps to 'sign in' again i give up and will go into the branch and tell them to cancel my paperfree statements.

Bank of Scotland Internet Banking offer better interest Rates in my opinion and are easy to operate online.

"Registering is Easy" you say. Not so!

Do I need to be a IT Nerd to simply register?

If you wish to see an example of user friendliness I suggest you refer to "Amazon". Look and learn.