If you have any stock in BankNorth, I suggest you sell it.
Because any bank with such utter disdain for customer service cannot possible survive.
Yes, I have a story. At 11:00 last Thursday I walked into my local bank, a bank I have happily used for nearly 20 years. They pay competitive rates, they are convenient, they give great customer service.
Whoops. That’s what they were like. Unfortunately, that was when they were a little group of local banks. But last fall they got gulped down by BankNorth, and this past month the local branch has been changed over to doing things “the BankNorth way.”
Back to story. The reason I went to the bank today was that a CD had come due, and I wanted to withdraw the money. Things start out well. This is a very small branch, located in a colonial era house. There is a tiny lobby with an ATM, and five feet past that is a small area with two desks where ‘customer service’ reps sit. When I enter, both desks have reps sitting behind them. There is no paperwork on either desk, and they are chitchatting.
Nothing wrong there, for as soon as I approach the desk area one of them greets me, and asks what she could do for me. I explain, hand over the CD records, and she leaves to go into area behind the main counter where the cashiers hang out. Five minutes later she returns, and tells me she’d given the CD to one of the cashiers, because only cashiers can cut checks. Fine.
She offers to help me with anything else. Now, in fact I’d planned to take care of opening my 2005 IRA today, using some of the money from the CD. But while she’d been in the cashier pit (I don’t know what it’s really called, so I’m going to call it that) I’d noticed the printed sheet of their current CD rates.
OMG. Now, one of the reasons I’d first started to bank there is that their rates are pretty good. There’s only one other bank in town, Fleet. Every time I’d compared rates, the little local bank had rates AT LEAST a half point better than Fleet, term for term. Well, Fleet is no more either, having been devoured by Bank of America at just about the same time as BankNorth took over my little bank. So I’d looked up the BoA rates on the web and printed them that morning, so I could gloat at how much better I would be doing at ‘my little bank.’ Guess what? For every comparable term, the rate BankNorth is offering is between .8 to 1.2 pts LOWER than Bank of America.
Well…I guess they have to get the money to reprint all the stationery somewhere, eh?
So when the service rep offers, I explain that I had intended to buy an IRA CD that day, until I had seen the rates. She basically says nothing in reply. There is nothing to say, really. “Yeah, our rates our crappy but we have really nicely printed documents”?
So then we sit there, looking at each other. Time passes. Nothing to do with my business there, but every two or three minutes some other customer approaches apologetically and reports that the ATM isn’t working. Each time one of the Service reps ‘apologizes’ with “Yes, it’s been out of service all morning, something about the computer. Sorry.” And time passes. Five minutes. Ten minutes.
When the fourth would-be ATM user gets sent away, I ask her why didn’t they put an ‘out of service’ sign on the ATM. She says, “That’s not the way BankNorth does it.” “Why not?” I ask, after a suitable pause for befuddlement. “If we put up a sign it was out of order, then customers would stop trying to use it. And then we wouldn’t know when it started working again.” And she says this as if explaining something obvious to a child.
Yes, that makes sense. Apparently BankNorth is making the entire branch self-service. Instead of one of their employees having to put up a sign, and then, oh horrors, walk five feet to check on the ATM every hour or half hour, they allow customer after customer to waste their time trying to use a non-functional ATM. Sweet. It does sort of put the kibosh on further conversation between me and rep, though.
Time continues to pass. 15 minutes now since the rep handed off my paperwork. I’m starting to check my watch, because I have to be back at the office by noon. At 11:25 I ask the rep if she could go see if there is a problem. I mean, how long does it take to type out a check?? She goes off.
I wait.
I wait.
At 11:35 she comes back, with a half-eaten piece of cake on a little plate. “Sorry for the delay,” she said, “One of the tellers is retiring so they’re having a party.”
!!! I stare at her. She says nothing. “Do you mean the entire bank has shut down right before the noon rush hour?”
“Uh.” Well, no, she allows. There’s still two tellers working, but they’re doing their best to handle all the people in line at the regular windows and so can’t be spared to handle my request.
I point out that I have now been waiting for nearly 40 minutes to get a single check written.
She says Sorry, only the cashiers can cut checks, but once they’re done with the cake…
I ask, through my teeth, if maybe the Bank President, whom I can see through the glass window of his office at the other end of the room, is qualified to cut a check?
She stares at me.
Why don’t you go ask him? I say.
She flounces off. More time passes. Finally, at 11:55 she returns with my check.
Yes, almost a full hour to get a simple check cut.
And I was made to feel like a horrible impediment for DARING to ask that the employees of a bank perform a simple, standard banking task during ordinary business hours.
Not to mention the 12+ patrons who got to perform ‘status checks’ on the ATM while I was there…
Stellar customer service, eh? Oh, well, they’ll probably get merged out of existence next week.
Oh, and a week or so ago I got a notice that they are changing their name. No long BankNorth, now it will be “T. D. BankNorth.”
Hmmm. All new stationery again. Look for their interest rates to drop again.
