BoA is pissing me off
I’ve been mostly happy with Bank of America for the two years or so that I’ve been a customer. That’s quickly changing.
I just tried to send the following message using their Online Banking customer service e-mail function:
This is my third message on this subject, and I’m quite disappointed at the customer service I’ve experienced thus far.
My personal credit card through BoA has been set up with my online banking account since I got it. It expired at the end of this month, and so a new card was automatically issued to me. However, the account disappeared from my online banking profile when that happened. At that time, I requested that all available accounts be added to my profile, but that did not happen. Instead I received an automatic message stating that an account number which was not mine could not be added to the account. Great.
If I try to enter the new credit card number into the Add/Remove Account box, I am given a message that says the card is an MBNA card and that I must go to an MBNA website to access the account. Upon going to that website, I am told that it is no longer available and that I should come back to this one. If this were a temporary situation during a merger/acquisition or if I had ever been an MBNA account holder, this might be an understandable error. However, that is not the case – and this user experience is alarming (and frankly, unacceptable) coming from a company like BoA.
I sent a second message explaining this situation, to which I have received no response at all. After about a week, I decided I would call the customer service number given in one of the automated replies I received before. After waiting on hold a considerable length of time, a helpful customer service rep said she would be able to take care of it, but when she made the change to “combine the accounts into the same profile” it had no effect on my online banking account.
She then said that I would have to be transferred to the Washington State online banking department and that they would be able to help me. I asked if I would have to talk to them and explain the situation again, and she said yes. Personally, this bothers me – as I don’t think customers should have to contact multiple customer service departments and explain both their situation and what a prior rep told them. The support personnel should be able to handle that work by themselves, and simply call the customer back when the issue has been resolved.
I didn’t bother her with that complaint though, and simply asked to be transferred so that I could get my online banking account fixed and make my payment. After she transferred me and I had selected the menu option for online banking issues, the call disconnected with an entirely unhelpful error message in the voice-controlled menu system (something like “An error has occurred, please call back and try again”). Needless to say, this is quite frustrating when you don’t know the number to which you were transferred.
Instead of trying to find it and navigate more customer service menus and departments, and waste another hour explaining my situation so far… I am sending this e-mail.
If I don’t receive a productive response by tomorrow, I’m going to start looking for a new bank.
Thank you,
Brandon
After submitting it, I was told that it is too long and messages must be 3510 characters or fewer. I pasted the message into Word, and it says the message is 3,052 characters with spaces.
WTF BoA
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LOL Brandon send it in parts ;P
Been like that for years, Brandon. Basically it has to do with Washington not allowing social security numbers as user id’s, and some of the credit cards requiring it (or something). I have 2 BofA online accounts, one a “Washington” account, that uses a name as id (this one shows my mbna account balances – it does show my other BofA account balances as well), and another “Soc Security” account, that uses the “My Profile” (which is a great service, imo), shows all my accounts (except for the mbna, although the “points” I have accrued on the mbna worldpoints account do show up) and other various investment info. So the online account that shows mbna does not offer My Profile, and the online account that shows My Profile doesn’t show my mbna account balance. Easy, no?
Of course agreed that this is stupid and unacceptable. It’s also been like that for quite a while, and actually used to be worse. I used to have to set one of my accounts to “Arizona” (tech support – “Oh just set it to Arizona” – instilling lots of confidence in how my sensitive information is being handled).
Whenever talking to customer service preemptively ask for their name before they get
yours. It will give them the impression that you are an internal customer service rep
doing a quality service check. Get their extension as well, this way you won’t have to
explain your situation twice. Also if it gets to the point where you have exausted all
patience ask for a manager, if it’s bad enough ask the manager to get his manager on the
call as well for a 3 way. I’ve had a situation with student loan’s where they had ruined
my credit and reported me being 6 months late in payments because they lost the form I sent.
I called them daily after that, shortly after that I was talking to someone in executive level
support and had the issue resolved in under a month, normally this would take 3-5 months.
If they have identified that it’s an issue on their end that prevents you from making payments
make sure they don’t ding you for late payments due to that.
All it is is their cheap computer systems. The online banking requires a DDA (ie checking). The online access is only a snapshot of accounts that are ‘domiciled’ in the same state, or on the same server. So you WA BoA accounts are on a system that sees the WA and ID accts, BoA hasn’t ever upgraded their computer systems since the big buy outs and mergers so the really really old WA/ID system can’t see the MBNA acct, which BoA decided to set in NH. In fact, most customer service reps who have access to WA/ID accts can’t even see any other states accts. So, best bet is close your accounts and go to a bank that has customer service cause it ain’t bank of america.