To think Halifax should not set their robots to phone you at 8 am on a Saturday

[Nosleeptillbedtime]

I have opened a HalifaxISA to transfer an existing ISA into. I opened it and arranged the transfer yesterday. I ticked all the boxes to say I did not want any marketing/ promotional calls or contacts at all which I think makes it bloody clear that I do not welcome intrusive and unnecessary calls. But was woken up at fucking 8am ( which was the first time in a month ds had not woken at 6am so my first much needed lie in for ages) by a phone call. I obviously panicked that the call was bad news given how early it was on a weekend and my Mum is unwell. But it was a fucking Halifax robot encouraging me to put money in my new ISA ( even though I already have and can't put any new cash in as have used this year's allowance elsewhere). I think calling at this time on a weekend is completely unacceptable, and actually I think this call was intrusive and unnecessary at any time. It is not as if they don't have my email.

Won't be banking with them agan after this and advise no one else to unless you like being disturbed by a robot at all hours!

It's awful. I worked in a collections department previously and working hours are considered to start at 8, so call centres are perfectly within their rights to call at that time on a Saturday which I think is dreadful.
Imagine some of the responses I (quite rightly) got to 'Hello sir, I'm just giving you a quick call about an outstanding balance of £5,134 to so-and-so, what are your intentions?' At 8am on a Saturday. If someone called to offer me money at that time I'd tell them to fuck off.

I wonder whether anyone in marketing has done any research into whether robot calls actually work? Does anyone ever actually sit through a robot call thinking, Goodness me, this sounds brilliant, I must note down all the details? Or do we all simply pick up the phone, clock that it's a recording, and put the phone down and get back to whatever it is that the call interrupted? That's certainly what I did when I got one half an hour ago.

Not always a bad thing. My mum was up at 7.30am the other week, checked her bank balance and found she was about £60 down. She asked her husband if he'd bought anything and literally just as he said he didn't think so, around 8am the phone rang and it was a Halifax robot telling her the recent transactions (it did go through security questions first). It turns out she had 12 fraudulent transactions because of an old but still active card that had been used in Turkey. If it wasn't done early it could have been a whole weekend before she had known and could possibly have had more transactions.

Make it clear to them, in writing, that any further calls to you of this nature will be reported to the police as nuisance calls.

For security, good thing. For anything else, bad thing.