I have about five active credit cards and decided to close down the ones I’m not using. When I call one company (First Bank USA), they immediately say that they’re doing some kind of changeover and I’ll have to call back in a few days.
I suspect this is a strategy they use to discourage people from closing their accounts. Sort of like insurance companies denying the first claim as a matter of practice. Tell every person on the first try that it isn’t possible, make them wait, and hope they change their mind. That’s what they’re doing, right?
When I worked for First USA (many years ago), we would say we were updating the servers when we were experiencing computer problems and nothing was working. Are you sure they said a few days and not a few hours? If someone called to cancel an account, we pretty much did it immediately.
I find it unbelievable that a company the size of FirstUSA would have their systems out of commission for several days. I think they’re just trying to discourage you from cancelling your card. I vote for “BS.”
I’m not quite sure how to interpret Grace’s response - she seems to be saying that when someone called to cancel, they automatically tried to put him off with a bogus excuse. If I’m reading that correctly, I wouldn’t give them the benefit of any doubt. I’d call back, and would insist upon speaking to someone higher up if I got the same routine.
I think you’re misreading what Grace said. She said that when they experienced computer problems, they claimed it was “upgrading servers”. Not that when someone called to cancel, they claimed a bogus problem.
Well, that’s what you get for calling at 2am on a Saturday. Because, as an IT professional, I can tell you that upgrades are scheduled for low use times.
You did call at 2am on a Saturday, right? Otherwise I call BS.
I see how you got that out of what I wrote, but it’s not what I meant. This is what I meant (and hopefully this will make sense)…
When I worked for First USA, we cancelled an account as soon as the customer asked us to do it. There were many times that someone would call and ask me to cancel their account. We didn’t have a specialized retention department so we just cancelled their account. No biggie.
If a customer called and we were having computer problems, rather than say “our computers are down”, we would ask them to call back in a couple of hours because we were updating the system. That’s why I wondered if cricetus was sure they said call back back in a few days and not a few hours.