You Can’t Always “Bank” on Customer Service

I’ve always viewed the services provided by banks and CPA firms in a similar vein.

Both entities oversee your money albeit in different ways and each strives to engender long customer relationships that hopefully will, over time, include additional ministrations.

For example, a CPA who prepares a client’s 1040 may want to expand that to include financial planning. Ditto for a bank who maintains a customer’s checking or savings account and offers a favorable interest rate on a mortgage or small business loan.

But consider this unlikely scenario: A CPA raises his billing rates by double digits to a long term and low maintenance client without a rather incredible explanation or reason.

If you were that client you would be more than understandably upset and certainly within your rights to begin shopping for a new accountant.

Now picture this, how about a 15-year customer at a certain bank - all the while keeping a sizable balance in their checking account - and, in addition, having a second mortgage loan and who was suddenly being hit with a $25 monthly service fee for the privilege of keeping their money in said bank?

Again, it would be advisable to take advantage of the plethora of offers from other lending institutions currently advertising no checking fees.

Welcome to my most recent experience at Bank of America. Now I realize it’s easy to bash the bigger brands throughout all industries – i.e. McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft et al. And in all honesty, sometimes it’s well-deserved criticism.

But to level a $300 annual fee for checking to someone who has been a faithful depositor since before Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were murky concepts in their respective creator’s heads, went beyond the boundaries of poor customer service – on any level.

Adding insult to injury, I had roughly $50 in unused Euros and Pounds from a recent trip oversees to which under BOA value-added services, they add to your account of choice. So you can imagine my surprise when my local branch informed me that the amount had to at least equal $100 American in order to perform the exchange. But they suggested I go to the closest foreign currency kiosk – which for those keeping score at home was 10 miles from my home – in a perpetually crowded shopping mall no less and one that charges a small fortune for parking.

At this point, my noted Italian temper flared to the surface and demanded to see the branch manager. I wanted to know why not only could they not exchange the currency but why I was paying $25 a month for the privilege of being told “no.”

He ushered me into his office and said he would contact customer service and have the $25 fee returned but the minimum exchange amount was a branch policy he could not override.

With some sense of victory I felt I had at least won the major battle. 

But I felt it was a Pyrrhic victory in terms of customer service as I’m not naïve enough to believe that’s the last time I or anyone else will have to endure that drill from a bank or any services provider.