Santander brings back call centres to the UK

Santander UK is returning all of its Indian call centres to the UK so that all retail banking customers ringing the bank will have their call answered by a UK-based employee.   The move is part of Santander's programme to further improve the service it offers and follows feedback from customers who say dealing with an offshore call centre is a frustration that can lead to dissatisfaction.

Abbey outsourced its call centre operations in 2003 to two centres in India - one in Bangalore and one in Pune.  All calls handled by these centres will now be dealt with by staff based in Glasgow, Leicester and Liverpool.  The project to return calls to the UK has been planned for many months and has seen a significant investment by Santander in the hiring of additional staff, training, IT and premises redesign, and this has enabled all calls from India to be switched to the UK this month.

Santander has hired an additional 500 UK staff to handle the estimated 1.5 million calls each month. The new staff are fully trained and are now available to take calls.  In total, Santander's UK call centres employ 2,500 staff.

Ana Botín, Chief Executive Officer of Santander UK, commented:  "Improving the service we offer is my top priority.  Our customers tell us they prefer our call centres to be in the UK and not offshore. We have listened to the feedback and have acted by re-establishing our call centres back here.    

"This is a great example of how we are redefining Santander UK and putting our customers first. This is a major step for us and I am determined that we will do even more to improve the service we offer as I plan further initiatives later this year to build on the progress we are making."                                                                                                      

The return of the call centre operations to the UK is the latest in a series of initiatives that Santander UK has announced, which include: 

A programme to address the root cause of complaints as a means of addressing any systemic issues that may exist;

1000 new staff in customer facing roles;

Creating a specialist call centre team - with their own dedicated telephone number - to deal with customers who need an issue with Santander resolving;

Resolve or refer system in branches and call centres that helps staff resolve customer issues faster; and

Dedicated staff helpline to assist with customer issues.

These initiatives have helped Santander reduce the volume of complaints in the last year, and mean that 80 percent of all complaints are now dealt with within 48 hours.   FSA data also showed that the volume of banking complaints received by Santander fell by 24 percent from the first half of 2010 to the second half.

Santander UK will introduce further initiatives later this year and expects to see further improvements in its complaints data in 2011.