Best HSBC Home Loans

Just absolutely awful customer service. Occassion 1: I wanted to confirm which offsets were attached to which accounts and I was given incorrect… Read more

information several times, and I had to keep telling the guy that it was impossible that I have 2 offsets on one account and none on the other. Despite this he doubled and tripled down and I had to on the call teach him how offsets worked, and he genuinely seemed like this was new information. This event took 20-30 minutes Occassion 2: I wanted to increase my payment limit (noting that I did ask someone on a previous call the day before if there was one and they told me "No sir, there are no payment or transfer limits on your account, its your money"), so I called and said "Hey I have just tried to transfer money across and I've got a message about hitting a limit, it said to call this number to request increasing the limit" To which I was told "Sorry sir I don't understand your concern" - this would have been fine if it was just a one off, but I then went on to repeat the entire circle 4 more times even with caveman like simplicity "I'm calling to increase transfer limit". We then got acknowledgement and I was asked how much I'd like to transfer. We then spent the next 20-25 minutes on the phone going in different circles of "Sir we can only increase to 50k for online, otherwise you have to go to the branch. And then when I requested that I was told "no we cannot update that, over 50k is at the branch. So I asked again to increase then to 50k, to which I was told no that would have to be at the branch. So I changed and asked, "Well how much can I have it increased to on this call right now", "Our online limit is 50k sir". So I asked for it to be increased to that limit, and again was told "Sir you have to do that at the branch". I kid you not this went around 8 times (I did count), all to come to the end she told me that actually they can't update my limits on the call, something that maybe should have been the absolute first thing said, but is also incongruent with the website/app which said to call to do that. Absolutely insane The follow up here is that to book an appointment at the branch (which is rated only 2/5 stars on Google as well) I spent 18 minutes on the phone to no answer and then it hung up. Comments from other reviews recently have said it would take between 2-14 days to increase a payment limit. Every other bank in the past 10 years I've worked with (and I've dealt with 8-10) have just had in app updates, or call above certain amounts. And I've never waited to be talked to for more than 5 minutes total, and the action was near instant, if not 5-10 minutes to reflect in the system at worst. How can HSBC keep going on like this.

I've had 10 or so similar encounters the past week, and unfortunately amongst 15 or so people I've talked to, there's not been one straight forward correct answer to simple banking questions off the bat. They seem to have no idea about how their own systems/banks/products work and can never really help.

The app is old and clunky, but it does enough to have it work, albeit not enjoyably.