TO: Neil Roberts, CHAIRMAN, BOQ

Dear Mr Roberts

Why does your bank make it so hard for your customers to use the internet? I have just spent half an hour on the phone to your staff trying to find out how to use the internet to make money transfers from my account and could not get past a bonehead called Jason who had all the helpfulness of a cracked record and who refused to put me on to anyone else with more brains. Everybody else was "in a meeting", allegedly. I do wish you would instruct your staff to stop using that threadbare lie when talking to customers. He promised to get someone more senior to ring me back but that too was the usual fraud. So I am writing to you. Why I should have to is beyond me but it seems the only thing to do that offers some chance of an intelligent response.

My A/c is 90 REDACTED and I have long ago set up my transfer limit as you require. Why you require that is also beyond me. I have a Commonwealth Bank A/c that put no such obstacle in front of me.

When I logged on to your internet site, however, and clicked "transfer to anyone", I got a page that had no means of entering to whom I wanted to make the transfer. A window dropped down but I could not type anything into it.

I therefore rang your helpline and asked what I had to do to enter a payee but your Jason refused to tell me unless I had a confirmation code. As far as I know I threw away the code as soon as I had entered it into your system as required.

In summary:
1). You put up stupid obstacles to transfers
2). Your computer system does not do what it says
3). Your staff refuse to help

And you claim that your bank is particularly customer-oriented! Please investigate and advise.

TO: John Nilas, Customer Relations, BOQ

Dear Mr Nilas

Thank you for your letter of 14th April. You must be an escapee from the Public Service. The message in your letter very clearly is: "There's no reason for it. It's just policy" Do you really think I or anybody else is going to be happy with that response to a complaint? I have pointed out two idiotic policies of the bank (No names on receipts and the barring of credit-card payments of fees) WITH THE GENERAL IDEA THAT YOU MIGHT CONSIDER CHANGING THEM. And if you are too wooden for that, you could at least have the courtesy to explain to me the wonderful wisdom behind the existing policies.

You must WANT shareholders to embarrass your chairman at the AGM

TO: Letters Editor, Courier Mail

Dear Sir,

The Bank of Queensland in its advertising claims that it puts people first. Ha! Ha!
They have now adopted the cheapskate and very inconvenient practice of printing their cheque A/c statements on both sides. They clearly put pennypinching first, not people. I asked if we could have the option of returning to the old single-sided statements but “No” was the answer.

Reply from Ms Heffernan

In response to your request that we give customers a choice of how many sides of their statement they want their transactions printed on I advise that we do not currently plan to provide this facility and I am not aware of any financial institution in Australia currently offering this service. As I said in my email of 9 August we will continue to listen to what our customers say about this change and make modifications when representative of customer feedback. That is, if we receive sufficient feedback indicating that we should print transaction details on only one side of our statement pages we will change back to that approach. In relation to item 3 of your email of 1 August, I did not realise that this was an outstanding matter between us. I passed on your feedback concerning your experience with the Queen Street branch staff to the Regional Manager and I apologise for not having advised you of this. Dr Ray, if I can be of any further assistance to you please do not hesitate to contact me.

Dear Ms Heffernan

Thank you for your comprehensive response, which I find generally reasonable.

I STILL however am exceedingly cheesed off by your cheapskate procedure of printing statements both sides. The idea that all customers should keep their statements in a ring-binder is just so incredibly authoritarian. I don't. And your new statements are a real pest to me. You remind me of Joe Stalin saying that there is complete freedom of speech in Russia as long as you agree with him. People are all DIFFERENT, you know: There is no Commo uniformity in Queensland. Could you not at least give customers an option of how many sides they want printed? I will definitely raise this at the next AGM if you do not.

From: jennifer.heffernan@boq.com.au To: jonjayray@hotmail.com


I refer to your recent correspondence. Firstly thank you for your feedback
and suggestions, it is important that we stay in touch with the views and
experiences of our customers and shareholders.

1. Linking of Bankcard account for Internet Banking

I agree that providing a total view of a customer's banking facilities
including credit cards would solve the issue. Currently credit card details
are held in a separate system however there are ways in which the fact that
a customer holds a credit card be held in the main banking system by
linking the card details to a transaction or savings account. It is
actually timely that you raise this as we about to reissue these procedures
to staff as recent events, including your feedback, have indicated this
procedure is not as well understood as it should be.

2. Length of account number to log onto internet

Bank of Queensland Customer Access Number is 10 digits (including the 3
leading zeros which are optional for entry). In banking these numbers can
range anywhere between 8 to 16 digits. Whilst the terms and conditions
require that the security of the Personal Access Code be safeguarded they
do not prohibit customers from writing down their Customer Access Number.
Customers are free to select their own Personal Access codes provided that
this meets minimum security requirements. I have been unable to locate any
bank which allows customers to select their own account number or name.

There are a number of reasons why I think that this would not work in a
banking environment:

. the customer selected name approach does not allow customers to change
their account number once they have made their initial selection. For
example, Hotmail do not allow customers to change their sign in name once
it has been selected. If you wish to change your name you have to close all
your accounts. Unlike Hotmail, banking practice would dictate that we can
not use this discarded number immediately.

.the customer selected name approach requires a large set of available
codes. For example, Hotmail are required to support up to 64 digit account
numbers for their customers. There currently isn't any banking software
available that I am aware of to support this approach.

3. Exiguous Bankcard Particulars

I agree with you that the current level of Bankcard particulars available
is not optimal. Ideally we would like to be able to provide up to 120 days
of transaction information as we do for other accounts however our card
system is not currently configured to enable this. This is one of the many
enhancements and improvements that we will make over time to our Internet
Banking service. A continuing balance facility is also in this category. We
already provide a current balance facility on the Transaction History page.

4. New Look BOQ statement

We were not trying to inconvenience our customers - our objective was to
modernise and update the look and feel of our statements. In addition where
statement details would have generated a second individual sheet the
details are printed on the statement reverse in a manner consistent with
filing in a two ringed statement binder. This is a reasonably common
approach in the industry.

Dr Ray, you are right when you say that we advertise the fact that we are
customer friendly but I would disagree with your view that this is a lie.
What being customer friendly means to us at the Bank of Queensland is that
we may not always get it right but we listen to our customers, are
respective of their views and that we try to meet their needs to the best
of our ability and the resources available to us . Inevitably we can not be
all things to all customers and I regret that you have such a negative
impression of our statement initiative. All I can say is that we will
continue to listen to what our customers say to us about this change and
make modifications when representative of customer feedback.

Once again thank you for writing to me and do not hesitate to contact me
with any further suggestions or feedback

Tran history

Ms Heffernan

The online transaction history that you give for a bankcard A/c is pretty exiguous. Could you not at least give an opening balance as well as a current balance? Pretty elementary, I would have thought.