Five days in to a bankwide phone system "upgrade" and work feels like an absolute out of body experience right now
Bank teller at a regional here. This is mostly a rant but if it helps keep any well meaning management from making the same mistake elsewhere I think it's worth posting the saga so far.
Monday there was a full org rollout of an "upgraded" and "improved" phone system both internally and externally and I genuinely am a little scared about how this will end because oh my GOD what an absolute TRAINWRECK.
Internally every extension has been messed with and they have what I can only assume is some kind of AI-driven speech thing where you ask it to send you somewhere but also if there's any ambient noise it resets the prompt. There is always ambient noise, obviously. The new extensions dont make sense and you cant hit someone's direct extension anymore either (:
It took a coworker an hour of shuffling through various prompts the other day to do a single foreign currency order. I waited on an entire lobby and drive thru both by myself during it (because of COURSE it was during lunches)
Customer side things are somehow even worse. Phone banking is useless. Nobody can get it to work. I had an older woman come in with a paper where she wrote down what the music and hold message marketing blurbs were saying to her and proceeded to ramble it off to me at the window for 5ish minutes and I have never been so thankful for the security glass because I thought I was going to throttle her by the end (it had already been a Very Hard day)
Literally every phone call we field at branch now is about the new phone system. When people cant get thru to phone banking or customer service (who i feel even worse for in all this) they call us and are absolutely psychotic over the phone. Swearing, name calling, vague threats, everything. The branch managers are close to revolting bc every customer wants a manager about this, obviously. They've banded together as a unified front calling for Something to be done.
We are also getting complaints about how we don't pick up the phones in branch half the time and that's simply because we are always all busy (staffing reductions LOL) and we dont have any automated hold system or anything, just the line and we aren't going to pick up over waiting on customers in branch. Phone rings continuously now and someone in branch quietly reduced the volume on the ringers which THANK GOD because it was starting to pavlov a trauma response in me to hear the phone ring.
Yesterday (Friday) we received an email trying to gaslight us into thinking this phone upgrade was Significant and Good, actually, despite it reducing functionality in every way. It also asked us to pretty please with sugar on top to say nice things about the phone system to customers while also gaslighting them about how it's an improvement. It reads like someone prompted an AI to write the whole thing, btw.
I can't even be mad at this point because anyone with a pulse will see through any attempt to glaze this thing. Customers literally watch us struggle in real time to access branch operations, eft, fraud, etc on the phone in front of them. Like putting icing on a turd.
I cannot fathom how this ends. What a generational fumble to break the one system boomers with money rely on the most.
And all this around a full moon. The ride never ends in this place.