My guess is Tris has his money and insurance with USAA. Available to military officers (current and former) and their families, and some enlisted personnel. Excellent customer service at all hours. Good rates for insurance, banking products. At one point, I had my checking account with them, but did not like having to put my paychecks in the US Postal Service system and hope that they made it to San Antonio, TX. USAA has now fixed that problem by setting up a system with UPS that guarantees next day deposits.
I’ll go a bit further: at least making a scene in the bank branch might make a difference: it’ll make BoA a less pleasant place to (a) work, and (b) be a customer, than it already is. If BoA becomes the least pleasant bank to work at, tellers will work at other banks when they can, and in times of high employment, BoA will be left with the ones who need remedial ed to be taught how to drool. The mistakes they make will drive customers away, and hurt the BoA bottom line. Stockholders get upset, and upper management can’t insulate itself from large stockholders who expect a return on their investment.
If being mean to people makes you feel happy, then sure, you have every right. This isn’t restricted to customer service interactions; you can be mean to people who’ve done nothing to you just for kicks in all your day-to-day affairs if you wish. It just means you’re an asshole. If you’re okay with that, go to town.
Also, just because a corporation may try to hide its decision makers from the public, that doesn’t mean they can’t be found or reached. If you want to actually make an impact, all you have to do is a bit of homework.
This is a new one, I’ll admit: “I am making an impact by bitching at customer service, because maybe if I do my part make someone’s job an unceasing hell, they’ll quit, and then if everyone does that, no one will work for the company anymore!” Right. I already said it: people have been making scenes in branches over the same shit since time anon. Banks are still doing that shit, and they’re still managing to hire people for customer service positions. And it’s not just B of A; as I already said, customer service in general, no matter the company, necessarily consists of people having to enforce policies over which they have no control nor authority to circumvent. My bank is a hell of a lot nicer than B of A, and when I was a phone rep, a conservative 70% of my calls consisted of people ranting about this or that. Believe me, there are plenty of people out there who share your stated goal of making customer service people’s lives harder. Somehow, the jobs still get filled. Seems your idealistic and noble goal of attempting to drive people who aren’t responsible for angering you out of their livelihoods just isn’t up to snuff.
The extent to which some people will go to attempt to find a justification, any justification, for pretending that they’re pursuing some high-minded ideological goal by bitching out customer service reps is simply mind-boggling.
You have to be a member of the US military or a spouse of one, or have had an account as a dependant of a member (which is what I did, and my son as well). USAA is a cooperative insurance corporation, owned by its members. About a decade ago they decided to open their own bank, a bank able to deal with members who leave the country without much notice, and have unusual legal needs regarding debts, and bills. They now have investment accounts, as well.
It exists to serve it’s members, who are both the stockholders, and the customers. A very good arrangement. I really think it is something that other identifiable groups should investigate. I just got my share of the insurance company’s profits credited to my insurance bill ballance. (Better than sending me a dividend, since a reduction in charges is not a taxable event! This is the sort of thinking you get when the stockholders are the customers.)
It’s in San Antonio TX. It’s probably not worth marrying a captain for, but close.
Tris
UPS backed out of the deal! Weeners.
But, now you can deposit@home! I scan a check, fill out the information on line, and it is deposited immediatly! Waaaay cool! Then I destroy the original, and keep a duplicate of the digital transaction, if I want. (I keep them for a week, since that’s about the longest it takes to clear the other bank involved.)
USAA was hugely apologetic about the loss of the UPS system, even though it was totally UPS’s fault. FEDEX wanted too much money, and the new technology helped a lot.
Love my bank.
Tris
Had not heard about the fallout with the UPS deposit set-up.
I was disappointed when I tried to talk with USAA about health insurance and they would not continue the conversation when they found out that I was overweight. They told me I had to lose weight and keep it off, BUT they would not tell me what weight I had to get to or how long I had to keep it off. So they do “cherry pick” healthier people for their health insurance plans.
Holy crap, that is awesome! Just when I think I couldn’t love USAA any more… Now my husband and I can dump our stupid BofA account that we kept open solely for those occasional check deposits we needed to make (another positive for USAA–they make it insanely easy to set up accounts to transfer money back and forth).
I recommend USAA every time I get a chance, for all the reasons Tris has already listed. Outstanding company.
I bask happily in the soft warmth from the knowlege that something I said might cost the Bank of America money!!!
Tris
“Beware the fury of a patient man.” ~ John Dryden ~
Sure. This cite leads to an excellent PDF which says among other things that NSF fees averages $28 and change in 2004. It also says that banks get about half their checking account income from overdrafts and that they deliberately set up their check processing system to maximize the number of overdraft fees they can charge when a customer screws up. The best part: the article compares NSF fees and those "payday loans’ everybody says are such disastrously bad ideas for consumers, and comes to the conclusion that payday loans are a better deal than a bank account for people with marginal incomes.
I’m sorry Luna, but the folks you work for are probably durned close to being crooks, IMHO, if the follow typical banking procedures.
I wasn’t recommending it; I don’t believe in that sort of conduct. I was just drawing what I saw as the implications of your posts here.
Try again? When I click on that link, I get a blank screen.
I disagree: the level of customer service I’ve received in non-BoA banks has almost invariably had little in common with what Tris describes. There may be others, I’m sure, but to say “everybody does it, so it won’t work” is bullshit.
First of all, I’m not talking about phone reps at all. What good could it possibly do to make a scene over the phone at someone who doesn’t actually do the work that needs to be done to keep the bank running, but rather only fields calls?
If a bank is shitty, and you want to affect their bottom line (apparently the only avenue of appeal), you want to scare off their customers, and scare off the people who would actually do the day-to-day work of the bank, which include the tellers, so that they leave and are replaced by less competent people who screw up more often.
Getting on the case of a customer service phone rep does neither of these. After all, it doesn’t matter if you scare off a customer phone rep; if they do their job badly, it doesn’t affect the workings of the corporation in the least.
But then, throughout this thread, you’ve been confusing very different things - such as Tris’ at most mildly rude refusal to follow the bank’s script with the cursing out of front-line workers.
It’s not my goal; as best as I can tell, it’s yours, because AFAICT it’s still the implication of your words that there’s nothing better to do.
Not mine; again, I’m just going with what seems to be the best strategy implied by what you’ve told me. I stand on the shoulders of giants, and all that.
And besides, see above - we’re not even talking about the same employees.
Or, you can just take your business elsewhere. I don’t see the need to be a consumer crusader, spending your time making everyone in the bank miserable so they’ll stop doing business there. If enough people don’t like BofA’s normal level of service, they will close their accounts on their own.
This is not a telemarketer situation where BofA is calling you and trying to sell you something. You are a BofA customer, and can choose to not be a customer anymore. Once that’s done, why do you have to try and make the rest of the BofA customers unhappy? I’m sure there are some people who are happy with BofA’s service, I don’t think they appreciate your efforts to ruin it for them.
Certainly not if I factored in the reaction from Kevbabe!
USAA sounds sort of like the mother of all credit unions. I’ve never had a complaint with either of my CUs. Due to thier small size, and local focus, there are a number of services they don’t/can’t offer; but what they do offer, they do well.
The deposit@home thing sounds wonderful. I’ll have to mention it to the managers of my CUs.
If BoA makes no effort to impede getting to the “once that’s done” part, then fine. (Remember that this is where we started.) But I’m certainly not going to blame a customer who, upon having multiple roadblocks thrown in the way of his efforts to cease being a BoA customer, decides to get vocally angry while waiting in the branch for a manager to be called to ask more dumb questions.