Worst:
Union Bank of California — After being in Japan for a little less than a year, I checked on the account I had there. I was informed that my account had been closed and that I owed them over $200, which debt they had already sold to a collection agency. I had had a few hundred dollars in the bank when I left, and there is no way under normal circumstances that money would have been used in service fees; I had calculated that I could leave the account open for more than 2 1/2 years without having to worry about adding more money.
An automatic transfer from my checking to my savings account had racked up service charges like crazy. What had happened was this: when my checking account was drained by the automatic transfer to savings, the transfer still tried to go through. Every time it failed, I was hit with a service charge. The checking account was supposed to be covered by the savings account. Every time there was an insufficient funds charge for checking, money would be transferred from savings, less a service fee. So basically, UBoC was racking up service charges on itself, but forcing me to pay for their clerical error. That automatic process ate up all the money in my account, and put me in debt to them until it reached a level where they suspended activity on the account.
I spent over an hour arguing with the manager that it was ridiculous for me to be charged for all this activity when it wasn’t due to anything I’d done wrong. It was even more ridiculous that they were insisting that I owed them money. She was adamant that, since they had informed me by mail, they were not at fault. Furthermore, since the debt had already been turned over to a collection agency, I couldn’t even resolve anything with UBoC directly. As far as they were concerned, I wasn’t a customer anymore, and would never be again because they wouldn’t ever open an account for me since I incurred a debt with them that went to collection.
Since I was only in the US for about three weeks, and I was mostly broke anyway, there was realistically nothing I could do about taking them to court. I even ended up having to pay the stupid #^¢*ing fee that the collection agency wanted because they got ahold of the contact information for my friend, who was paying credit card and student loan debts for me from money that I transferred to him from Japan, and were sending him dunning notices and calling at all hours.
UBoC got away with a perfectly legal theft of my money and there was nothing I could do about it. If I could utterly ruin their business, beat every person involved in screwing me to within an inch of their lives, raze the building I opened the account in, and piss on the rubble, I might feel a lot better about what happened. As it is, I’m still livid about it almost seven years later.
American Airlines — Both good and bad. We made our reservations for our honeymoon flight months in advance because scheduling was critical. We were seeing off two sets of guests from overseas that same day and needed a specific flight so that we would have enough time to get to the airport, turn in the rental cars, and get our guests to the right terminals before leaving for our flight. We received no notice that that flight had been cancelled. Considering that we made the reservation through an automated system, you would think it would be a simple thing to send a message to the email address that the confirmation was sent to when a change like, say, canceling an entire flight happens. Admittedly, we should have checked a couple of days in advance to make sure that the flight was still okay, but we had other things on our minds . . . like getting married.
Our flight was bumped to a later flight. Much later. Nine hours later. And it was a red-eye. We had planned on staying the night in a hotel in Miami and catching our connecting flight to Jamaica the next morning after having some actual sleep. Instead, we had to sort of doze on the plane. We spent four hours at the airport waiting for the first flight the next morning and we lost the money we had already paid for the hotel in Miami. We got to our hotel in Jamaica completely exhausted.
On the good side, AA has a great employee. First of all, she apologized and took responsibility for the problem. You’d be amazed how much that defuses a situation. (The guy we talked to before her was an ass about it.) She multitasked, helping us while simultaneously helping two other people who had gotten screwed on different connections. She called the Miami hotel in an attempt to get them to give us a refund (she was unsuccessful, but she tried). Instead of stranding us at the airport for half the day, she wrangled airport shuttle tickets to just about anywhere we wanted to go in the San Francisco area. We spent some time in Fisherman’s Wharf before heading back to the airport.
All in all, it worked out okay. We got to where we needed to be at about the time we were supposed to, ultimately. We got some time to hang out in SF together, just the two of us instead of the passle of guests we’d had with us all during the wedding stuff. And our luggage didn’t get lost. I’ll never fly American Airlines again unless I have no other choice though. Especially if it’s a time-critical flight, I’ll find another way to get there because I obviously can’t count on AA.
Best:
As usual, the bad customer service sticks out more, but I had good experiences with both times I had to get repairs from Apple. One was a keyboard on my PowerBook G3 that was ruined by my spilling orange juice on it. I had to navigate voice mail and wait for a representative, but was on the phone for less than 20 minutes before talking to a real person. They sent me a package, I sent them the computer, they had it back to me in about a week. I remember that it actually got back to me the day before they quoted. I wasn’t charged for shipping or time, even though it was an out of warranty repair; they only charged me for the keyboard.
The second repair was for replacing a hard drive that failed about 15 or 16 months after purchase. (I realize now that I probably could have worked the system better by buying the extended warranty before sending the computer in for repair, or just replace the drive myself.) I’m guessing that my keeping the computer in my backpack and regularly running a couple of km to catch the train didn’t have a salutary effect on the lifetime of the drive. They quoted a week, and had it back to me in four days. It’s two years later and I’ve had no other problems with the drive or the computer.
Good customer service is the norm in Japan. I’m unpleasantly shocked just about every time I go back to the US at how abrupt, uninvolved, and ill-tempered most people working in the service industry are there. Half the time I feel like telling them, “If you don’t like your job, find another one, if for no other reason than that I, as a customer, don’t want to deal with your attitude.” And I worked retail for a year and a half, including two Christmases. I know whereof I speak.
The delivery guys had to take the handles off to get it through the doors. When removing the freezer door they put a small, like 3mm long, scratch on the door next to the handle. They called me over, pointed it out and offered to go get another one. It looked to me that they would probably scratch the next one also (poor design), and it really was almost invisible, I said no problem bring it in. Boy did they look relived.