Personal Banker Review

My day to day role involves servicing and opening accounts for Santander customers. I deal with all different queries from bereavements to new accounts for customers. I also deal with mortgage, business and wealth management referrals. I do also sometimes get involved with complaint handling and I am the mortgage champion in my branch.

I have learnt many new skills, I am more confident dealing with customers on a face to face basis now because my previous experience has been call centre related. In terms of the skills I have developed many, these include but not limited to dealing with all customer enquiries, understanding a customers situation to resolve any issues and also working as part of a larger team

I have recently completed my programme and I can say that it was an intensive 18 months but it was all worth it when I received the certificate from our CEO!. I would highly recommend the programme to anyone who wants a challenge but a rewarding challenge. I would recommend a few tweaks but they are very small issues.

At the beginning the course structure was not very good as the course was brand new to my company and myself and the group were the first ones to complete it so we were always going to be guinea pigs. Once the issues had been addressed its fair to say it ran really well!

Again, at the beginning the support was very poor due to the issues raised in question 4. Once the issues had been resolved the support was far better. The feedback given to our employer was more around them allowing us enough time during work hours to complete what we needed to do whilst still serving our customers.

The support was very good, we had continued support from our learning manager and weekly WebEx training to discuss any findings or issues we had. At all points throughout we could email or call our learning manager for help and if they weren't available they would call us back.

I feel the training has helped but especially for the fact this apprenticeship was one that Santander which to continue in the future I would definitely say that it could of been a bit more tailored to our day to day roles. By doing this it would mean we could relate more to our roles.

We do have networking around once a quarter but this could be increased in terms of frequency. We do a lot with the community i.e charities and local organisations we can help with in our own time. I would like to see my company allow us to use business time to help the elderly.

No

I wouldn't recommend Santander for a few reasons. When there is an internal issue with systems etc they are very long winded to resolve and sometimes the policies are conflicting. Staff benefits have got worse over time also. Santander are closing branches and the way they have dealt with people at risk of redundancy is very poor.

Make sure you always remain customer focused and help the customers where possible even if you have to go above and beyond. Santander offer great products to customers so make sure you embrace all the changes and maximize your knowledge of the company and products to ensure you do the right thing for the customer.