Managers pulling a heist
Revolut, the online-only bank, is an interesting management case study in multiple ways:
- Anti-Money-Laundering: Do the opposite
- User verification: Do the opposite
- User interface speed: Match
- Customer service speed: Match
- Customer service quality: Do the opposite
- Documentation: Do the opposite
A previous article examines the first three for customer, regulator and management takeaways, focusing on the most glaring issues in Revolut’s AML procedures. This article dives into the latter three.
The “heist” in the title refers to multiple managers in Revolut ripping off both their employer and clients. Providing no useful service to either, leeching off the time and money of both. A company would do well to understand when this is happening to them and act before the losses pile up.
Customer service speed
The one positive thing to say about Revolut’s customer service is that it’s blazing fast. They sometimes provide useful responses. That happens mainly when you’re asking about their user interface, like “Where to find X”. In those cases you’ll be very happy for the speed.
This aspect of their customer service is exceptionally well managed, and is something that other businesses should copy. Managing customer service at the speed of Revolut, but with the quality of an actually good company, will make your customers very loyal.
Next we’ll look at one case of a company trying to use one feature that’s part of Revolut’s more expensive service package, and how lack of documentation and non-existent customer service quality make this impossible. These turn the customer from someone who used to recommend Revolut to someone who is recommending against using Revolut.
Case CSV
For example, they claim to support sending bulk transfers by a CSV file. They have, once, provided me with a template for the format of that file. The ability to use CSV files is part of their more expensive service package. I took it once, expecting it to be reasonable. However, there is no documentation whatsoever for the CSV. The example file only has one line, which is the header. It goes like this:
Recipient name;Account number;TimeEtc;Etc2;…
There are dozens of fields. None of them are documented. There are endless ways for how to format a time field (e.g. mm/dd/yyyy, d.m.yyyy, dd.mm.yyyy, yyyy-mm-dd-hh-mm-ss, Unix timestamps), even if you wouldn’t be dealing with time zones. What format should you use for each field? If there would be only possible 20 ways for the time field to be formatted, and 20 for another, that’s already 400 combinations. But there are dozens of fields, so there will be millions of potential combinations.
Documentation
Naturally, every service I’ve come across has a good documentation for what kind of CSVs their system accepts. Here’s a screenshot of the Finnish Tax Authority’s CSV documentation for their salary calculation service.
The file has a header row and example content rows. From the example rows you can see how everything is formatted, whether it’s a date or something else.
Revolut also provides you a sample CSV file. However, it only has the header row. No example rows 🤯
They have no documentation for the CSV format. Not on a web page, as they absolutely should. Not provided by the support. Not provided by their CSV specialist team. No documentation at all. It’s just you and your ability to spend forever to try out different guesses.
Their CSV validation tool only provides one response: Error, invalid CSV file. Nothing of help.
Customer support quality
Their customer support – that’s what we originally talked about. You’ll surely guess where I’m going with this. I don’t want to depress you, but I wish I got back all the hours and days of my life that I spent interacting with them. Even just on this matter.
For example, they asked me to send a copy of one version of the file I had tried and their system had unhelpfully just rejected. I told them I had tried it with and without the header row, as they couldn’t even tell if it should be included or not.
A few days later they came back with this response: “Try it with the header row included.” Which I had told them I had already done.
Revolut’s support has only one mission: to get paid by providing an illusion of doing something useful.
Takeaway: Revolut managers pulling a heist
Revolut support is there to rip both you and Revolut off. For you as a paying customer, they’re a waste of time and money. But so it is for Revolut: They pay their customer service and spend money managing them, without getting anything of value. The speed of customer service adds no value when they consistently get everything wrong.
It’s like a car that sounds nice but cannot move anywhere. It doesn’t work for its primary purpose.
It’s a very weird customer service culture to witness. Revolut support is like one big career-long heist for most people involved.
The fault is less with the agents than the managers. They are the ones choosing what level of service is acceptable or even made possible. Having customer service agents that don’t understand anything they’re talking about is the managers’ fault. Non-performers should not be given work shifts. However, in Revolut support even the best agents are powerless to get almost anything useful done. This is also clearly the fault of managers of multiple departments, not just the customer service.
We don’t yet know exactly how deep and wide do Revolut’s issues go, but at least this much can already be said:
Those managing Revolut’s customer service, KYB (know-your-business) and CSV import processes are pulling a heist.