With the benefit of five years’ hindsight, I can identify the support needs that speak to these issues, which boil down to two things: paper trails and a designated point of contact.
Clara Oliver, 37, Administrator (name changed)
About Our Blog Series
Welcome to the first in our monthly series of blogs looking at the support that would enable people with accessibility needs to use everyday services with as little disruption to their lives as others do (or at least, as little disruption as possible).
Each entry in this series has been written by someone with lived experience of a particular support need.
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With that, here is our first post, from Clara Oliver (not her real name), a 37 year-old administrator.
A Single Point Of Contact
There is a large padded envelope in a box in the storage space under my bed that has been there, unopened, for five years. I’m not a hoarder by nature, but I am unable to throw this envelope away; I also find myself unable to open it. It remains there, sealed like a fly in amber, perpetually held in a moment of stasis.
The envelope contains physical and electronic copies of documentation and phone calls I was given after I submitted a subject access request (SAR) to my bank. It is the only tangible evidence of one of the most distressing periods of my adult life; vindication and solidity after more than six months of being gaslit and humiliated. I made the SAR in the hope that I would one day be able to review it all in service of processing the trauma, but I don’t think that day will come soon. I have tried instead to funnel my energies into contributions to the broader good, like this blog post.
I have had periods of depression and anxiety throughout my adult life. My mental health fluctuates significantly over variable durations of time – I have ‘good spells’ which can last for years, or ‘bad spells’ of a few weeks or months. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the intersections between my mental health and my financial position are significant. I think this is something that most people understand intuitively – nobody thrives when the bailiffs are knocking at the door or the bank is sending threatening letters – but very few people are willing to talk about it.*
In 2019, with the support and encouragement of a colleague, I approached my bank about finding a resolution to an untenable financial position. Put simply, I had acquired a substantial overdraft overnight in order to avoid a CCJ, and I couldn’t dig my way out of the hole. My mental health was poor; I was sleepless, anxious, and hopeless. What I wanted was (to my mind) relatively straightforward: a payment plan, the reduction or removal of interest charges for a fixed period, or some other combination of help and support to enable me to get back on my feet financially. My colleague had advised me to request to speak with the ‘vulnerable customers’ team at the bank, a purported shortcut to a corner of compassion and humanity within a vast and soulless multibillion dollar corporation.
What I got instead was a six-month period of being trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of poor support from my bank, which exacerbated my depression and anxiety, which increased my support needs, which the bank could not meet, which exacerbated my depression and anxiety, and so on. I want to be clear about the distinction between the resolution I was seeking (a plan to resolve my financial situation) and the support needs I had (the ways in which the bank interacted with me during the time it took to develop the plan in question). In the end, the resolution was satisfactory; the way that the bank managed the situation and supported me as a customer was not.
The downward spiral of my mental health during the period I was interacting with my bank could be attributed almost exclusively to having to explain my situation anew to a different person at the call centre every time I called before I could proceed any further, and an unwillingness of anyone I spoke to at the bank to put anything in writing. With the benefit of five years’ hindsight, I can identify the support needs that speak to these issues, which boil down to two things: paper trails and a designated point of contact.
Who does it serve to have a different person dealing with the same customer each time? Who benefits? When the customer is expending valuable mental and emotional energy on the initial hurdle of explaining their situation on the phone and waiting to be directed to the right person, by the time it comes to the substance of the enquiry, they are completely exhausted and ill-tempered. A designated point of contact – even if that means more limited availability – could have prevented my descent into despair. Going through a call centre every time is a demoralizing and dehumanizing experience. If I could have been given the direct line for one person who was managing my case, it would have removed the vast majority of the distress and frustration I experienced. I would have accepted a significant reduction in the window of time in which I could call to discuss my case, if I knew that the person on the other end was well-informed and would be the same person each time.
My anxiety at the time also caused me to be very distrustful of anything anyone at the bank was telling me. I was eventually offered (verbally) a plan to resolve my situation that was acceptable to both me and the bank. I didn’t want to agree to anything, however, until I’d seen the offer in writing, but the bank employees were extremely reluctant to send anything. I had to call three days in a row in order to persuade them to agree to send me the details in writing. I found this to be incredibly poor practice regardless, but for someone who had already declared their anxiety, I found it incomprehensible. From my end there was no official record of all these phone calls, and I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t some ‘catch’ to this offer that was, as it turned out, going to help me out of a sticky situation.
When it came to actually accepting the offer, I had to take the signed paperwork to a local branch and ask them to scan and email it to the relevant team. I did this, but the paperwork was lost by the bank. I only found this out because I was calling every day to confirm whether or not it had been received. I was told – repeatedly – that if I had taken it to the bank, it would have been dealt with appropriately. That turned out not to be the case and I felt gaslit. The ‘no news is good news’ approach is an absolutely terrible one to take for a customer who has anxiety.
A brief summary via email of actions taken or things discussed after each call could have been the difference between a downward spiral and my return to mental health equilibrium. Perhaps if I didn’t now know that the resolution to this issue was within reach of the bank all along – as customer notes, firstly on their internal computer system and now in hard copies as a result of my subject access request – I would be able to contemplate opening that envelope.
*Martin Lewis being the notable exception, of course: https://www.moneyandmentalhealth.org/
Summary of support needs covered in this post
- I need a single point of contact when discussing my account
- please provide me a summary of what was said following our discussion
- please provide me a summary of agreed action points and timeline following our discussion
What We Need 