| Product: |
Abbey National |
| Date: |
18/05/01 (197 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Coffee and Banking
Disadvantages: Noisy
Well many of you are shareholders in Abbey National, and a larger number are customers of Abbey National.
Nearly a year ago, Abbey introduced a concept that would revolutionise the way we bank. It was the first type of bank in Europe and was largely regarded as a waster of money by critics. What am I talking about I hear you ask - The partnership between Costa Coffee and Abbey National.
I burst out laughing when a colleague at the Barnet branch of Abbey National told me they were going to put a coffee shop into the place and then looked at the calendar to check that it wasn't April Fool's Day. My colleague was in fact being completely serious. I thought to myself has the management finally cracked under the pressure and gone loopy?
But alas I was wrong. The management had a vision that banking was a hassle and customers needed a way to make banking less tiresome. And so they proceeded with their plans and at the end of July Abbey National and Costa Coffee opened its doors in Barnet, the first in a new format of branches that is spreading across the country.
It seemed surreal walking into the branch on my first day back at work after a holiday in Kenya. The place looked ultra modern and completely different to the branch I'd waved goodbye to in June 2000. It was like walking into a coffee shop with Internet cafe, not a bank. As you enter you are gripped by ATM machines, and the coffee shop along with three Internet banking points, although customers are allowed to use the net as they wish, apart from checking e-mails, which has been banned.
Further down you see a digital television, along with the customer service representatives and the counter. A whole new interactive experience.
The first signs to me were that the customers wouldn't like it, but I was proved wrong. I've never seen the place as busy as that first Saturday that I worked there after the re-fit. And the customers have kept comin
g back and new business has in fact increased since the revolutionary change. I left the company back in September to move to Manchester, but I am eager to see if things are the same when I begin work there again in June 2001.
From all accounts though, it seems that this brainwave of Abbey National is a key way to preventing branch closures and increasing new business- a good deal for both the company and the customers.
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