A short conversation with a bank
newsletter.danhon.com
newsletter.danhon.com
BS: Have a question? Ask us via this very useful secure messaging form!
Me: Great! Can you explain the difference between these two arcane out-of-pocket limits that you display that are un-Googleable and nowhere in your documentation that I can never find anyway?
BS: Sure! We will wait two days and then send you an email suggestively titled "a response to your inquiry" that really just contains an attached PDF with a link to a completely different portal where you have to register a new account to download an image of a scanned fax that tells you to call customer service where you can wait on hold forever to answer whatever question it was you had that we also don't remember! Yay secure messaging!
Me: Wow such technology! I now very understand the difference between "out of pocket max" and "max out of pocket max"! I feel much secure that I won't go bankrupt the next time I have an incident and get treated by the wrong doctor at the right hospital! Thanks, 2022!
Fin.
There's neither the individual or management will to successfully migrate or upgrade at the pace required. Consequently, everything is held together with duct tape and person-hours.
Everything new is the same. Because everything has to be disruptive innovative hockey stick growth bullshit.
Here's a screenshot of tha app for a Swedish bank, Klarna: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FHXG5bPX0AIC1oe?format=jpg&name=.... They are a bank. They offer credit cards, and fast online credit payments.
And no, "Payments" isn't a list of your payments you've done throught them, that's behind two or three clicks now. It's what you owe them.
They are functional, practical, reasonably intuitive and they keep improving with actual valuable and handy features. Every now and then it still boggles my mind when I use them.
Whenever there is a request for reviews I make sure to mention it. I hope the dev team is paid well because they clearly deserve it.
Max Out of Pocket: This is the yearly maximum accumulation that an insured individual must pay before the insurer takes on full financial responsibility for subsequent claims. This comes in generally one of two flavors: a family or individual.
The individual is straightforward. If you have a MOOP of $1000, and you've paid out $1000 in copays or coinsurance after meeting your deductible on just you, you no longer owe any contribution on claims for you, for that year. However, someone else in your family on your insurance will have to have their copays/coinsurance paid until either their individual MOOP is hit, or between the two of you you accunulate enough for the family MOOP to kick in, which depending on the nature of the plan, will start covering expenses for everyone else in the family unit.
Out_of_pocket_max is likely the individual MOOP. Max_out_of_pocket_max is probably a terribly named family or Group MOOP. These should not be confused with policy or lifetime maximums, which are caps to the amount of a specific benefit the insurer is willing to pay out for you as an individual period.
I know for a fact places screw that all up. I spend a large chunk of time making sure things like that do not stick around.
When I called, I was told that it's there to show that the OOP max for in-network and out-of-network providers isn't summed to get my total OOP max; instead it's just equal to my OON OOP max. (Of course, this plan makes it hard to go bankrupt, unlike all ACA plans. That was a bit of literary liberty.)
I'm guessing they probably have some funneling arrangement that recoups the extra spend they'd incur from the potentially more frequent MOOP attainment in network.
Cute, but it really kinda sidesteps the concept of "Max out of pocket". I sense an MBA at work.
Just blindly signing it means exactly what is on that sheet of paper, that the provider settles on an amount, and you are accepting an obligation to repay it. Redlining and setting a ceiling on what you're willing/able to pay shows good faith. Which if it comes to a court case, goes a long way.
https://obamacarefacts.com/health-insurance/out-of-pocket-ma...
Now keep in mind, as mentioned earlier, if you go to an out-of-network provider, and get billed for the balance of what that provider charges and your insurance won't cover, that is now between you and the provider because the insurance claim is technically complete.
This is why in some cases you may want to redline the financial responsibility statement and specify you will pay up to a set amount over what your insurer disburses. Technically, the provider can come back and grumble, but if you absolutely cannot afford to get nailed with a notorious "surprise" medical bill, that's a much more "good faith" way to approach the transaction.
It sucks... I know.
That's how a society is supposed to work: you don't leave people to suffer because they aren't rich.
Why do we do it for health care or health care insurance? If the justification is "everyone needs it and you will die without it" then shouldn't farms and supermarkets also be public utilities? The line seems entirely arbitrary to me. Water yes, but food no? Why education and healthcare? Why not heating and electric power?
The added benefit of letting people arrange it individually is that those with a higher risk appetite are not forced into it (at significant personal expense) against their will/consent, too.
We certainly do: taxes fund social programs like welfare and subsidies, which allow every member of society to afford a baseline level of food, housing and transportation.
Back in World War II, food supplies were rationed precisely because everyone needs them, so food vendors have certainly faced regulation in times of scarcity. Farmers still receive sizable EU and US subsidies. [1] [2]
In the US, the government purchased bulk amounts of foods for decades. [3]
We don't buy bulk food because it's a commodity with low entry costs, and between subsidies and SNAP we can keep food almost universally available. We should be doing more, because people do fall through the gaps and our agriculture subsidies could be better directed.
We subsidize transportation and oil to keep costs down. We should do more to expand free at the point of access mass transit.
There are means-tested programs for cell phones paid entirely by tye federal government (you may hear them coloquially referred to as "Obamaphones").
Many people believe basic, low cost banking services should be provided through the USPS. I believe Senator Elizabeth Warren is an advocate for this policy.
> Why do we do it for health care or health care insurance?
Health care and health insurance are different from the other examples you listed. If a person is in dire need of care, they are unlikely to be able to shop around. They might not even be in a condition to prove they are able to pay, so we require hospitals to treat people without waiting for such proof, which means providers can take on significant losses which need to be covered.
And to keep costs down in such a system where you cover these cases, it makes sense to invest in preventative care, up to the point of paying people to get it.
Entry costs to starting a hospital or becoming a health care professional are high because people want some standard of safety. This lumits competition that makes your other examples work.
> Water yes, but food no? Why education and healthcare? Why not heating and electric power?
Yes to all of the above. Since you added heating and electric, often low income will qualify someone for assistance, eapecially heating in colder regions. Since the market functions well enough for people with sone money, means testing seems to work well enough here.
> The added benefit of letting people arrange it individually is that those with a higher risk appetite are not forced into it (at significant personal expense) against their will/consent, too.
The challenge is that if you make people arrange it individually, there is incentive to underestimate the risk (higher risk means higher premiums) and then they might need care that they cannot afford. The health care system sometimes still incurs this cost because they might have to provide emergency treatment (and many conditions untreated due to costs can become emergencies).
DED-INN/OON
Me: $7k/$35k
Fam: $14k/$70k
OOP Max-INN/OON
Me: $7k/no max
Fam: $14k/no max
I regret leaving my grandfathered plan from 2010 - every year I got a threat saying it would be gone next year, then magically one more 'extension' with a threat that it would be gone next year again. And the price kept going up. Switched to ACA plan and... I missed this 'no max' stuff. Fingers crossed I don't need healthcare if I'm ... you know, outside whatever 'network' might happen to take me in for care.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm currently looking into ACA plans and would rather not go bankrupt...
I hate medical billing to the point I dove in to try to figure out how it all works.
Can you tell?
In California it is nearly impossible to find therapy or similar services that don’t charge much more than the per service maximums allowed by Anthem Blue Cross (and likely others).
This is primarily about out-of-network care, but good luck finding a competent therapist in-network in the Bay Area.
For example, the max paid for a therapy visit might be $120 while the providers typically charge $160-180/session.
On my plan, out-of-network providers were supposed to be 70% covered but I only learned after the fact that coverage was 70% up to the plan max for the stated service.
How was one to know the plan max per service? Therein lies the trick, they won’t tell you until you are on the plan and even then you cannot simply ask for a list of limits by service. You have to ask one by one after you have already committed to the plan.
The plan providers do not proactively disclose even the existence of these per service limits during open enrollment, and certainly not the detailed limits.
The plan providers continue to do this year after year despite knowing full well that their limits are well below market rates. As a result predicting out of pocket costs for therapy or other mental health services is next to impossible.
It feels fraudulent and deceptive even though I suspect they have excellent lawyers who keep them coloring just inside the lines so as not to get sued.
Still, I sometimes wonder if a class-action lawsuit might be the best solution.
> For example, the max paid for a therapy visit might be $120 while the providers typically charge $160-180/session.
These seem tightly (and unsurprisingly) linked. If you were competent at your job and had a choice to bill $120/hr or $160/hr, which would you choose?
If you weren’t competent, having a steady stream of $120/hr customers pipelined to you would be mighty convenient as well.
What that meant was if you had advanced needs you ended up paying out of pocket a lot.
This is the real problem. If we could solve that, none of the rest would be an issue.
Are you serious? Is this a real act? We need an act of congress to not be surprised by health care?
I see a trend!
Similar adjustments?
Can't count how many times this kind of thing has worked.
"We will start using Google Classroom for all communication, class materials, lesson videos, live meetings, and grades"
Sure. Good. Come grade time:
"Your child is missing a lot of work. It's all due in a week."
Kid, you have to do x,y,z missing assignments listed on Google Classroom.
"Your child has already completed x."
It was marked missing on Google Classroom.
"Please refer to Infinite Campus to see which assignments are missing."
Ok...I signed up for Infinite Campus, and I don't see anything.
"Did you use the user/pass we automatically created for each parent?"
What? No.
"Sir, we sent out this information weeks ago."
Search...search...manual search...I don't see it on Google Classroom.
"Oh, we sent it through ClassDojo."
---
This is very simplified. Google Classroom required teacher-provided codes to join "classes" for each subject, provided through...school email! School email is an unused morass for Google Classroom notification emails for every action your child or their teacher makes. Get a teacher message on ClassDojo? Sorry, can't tell if it was a mass message or directed at you, so you have to clarify whether it applies to your kid given their IEP. Got two parents using Dojo? Sorry, can't see if the other parent has already responded to a teacher message. Completed an assignment on Classroom but didn't click "Turn in"? Missing. Can't find where to enter answers? Oops, your child knows to use ImagineMathExploreLinkConnect to get to that material. Completed on that fourth-party platform, but didn't go back to Classroom to click "Turn in?" Missing. Triple checked everything but still a bunch of missing assignments in Infinite Campus? Teacher is behind on grading, and there's no way to know that, either from Infinite Campus or Google Classroom, but it was in the class newsletter we emailed to your child.
Maybe not all employers, but at least mine does not realize quite how much further parents fell behind that year than those without school-age kids, on balance.
When schools excitedly announce a new platform for learning anything, I want to punch myself in the face.
My son is the same. He started kindergarten completely comfortable with negative numbers (we just always drew the number line with both positive and negative parts) and basic algebra and only was allowed to test to enter the gifted program in third grade.
They are finally doing algebra again now that he is in fourth grade (they do math grades 3 and 4 in third grade and 5 and 6th grade math in 4th grade) but if we hadn’t set him up with a tutor a couple of years ago he’d have given up on school completely.
My younger son in 1st grade has autism (and is also gifted), to the point that he is legally supposed to have a permanent paraeducator with him at all times to help him cope with classes and physically help him if he needs help with basic tasks like holding his pencil, or realizing that he is frustrated and can’t communicate that.
Covid meant no paraeducator. Oh, they had one on the payroll, of course, but they were virtual. So the person who was supposed to help my son hold a pencil and detect he was frustrated and so on, was just a person on a zoom call.
My son lost almost a year of learning because of covid. It would have been more but we sued the school district to demand they at least put a plan in place and miraculously the day they were served with the papers, they told us “oh, we were just about to have a solution for you” and miraculously the same week, he was back in school with his para helping him with the virtual lessons.
My youngest daughter started kindergarten during covid. Everything was online. Her assignments were all in class dojo or maybe google classroom. All of the assignments had written instructions for her to follow. She was just starting Kindergarten and couldn’t exactly read well enough to follow the instructions.
All of this mean my wife and I basically spent all day as full-time teachers aides, because the kids couldn’t be left for even a few minutes by themselves. This is a difficult thing to do when also working full time.
Covid especially sucked for families with young special needs children. I think these kids were done a huge disservice.
All I can say is I'm glad we are all back in-person. The full-time dual-career parents as teacher's aides life was a fever dream of nearly snapping daily.
As a final anecdote: our kids had a full-time gym teacher. They were supposed to have “gym” lessons three times a week.
For the entirety of covid, their “lesson” was a single powerpoint slide with the words “go play” on it.
That was the entirety of the work that needed to be done by the gym teacher for a year - post that one slide to google classroom at the appropriate times.
In California, this shouldn't happen. If you go to an in-network hospital, all care providers you see are required to bill you at the in-network rate.
Never happened. They never pick up the phone, and they don't have any other way to contact them after you applied for benefits. I tried for weeks to resolve an issue with an application for my father, a dozen of calls, every time being on hold for hours. Sometimes the automated system says "leave your number and someone will call you back tomorrow at a certain time". That's a lie, no one has ever called back.
That seems a very strange conclusion to me. Health care in the US is a mess right now, public or private, largely because of the mess caused by extreme privatization. Half of the problems people have with health care would vanish overnight if we had universal health coverage.
Me: logging in to My Government using DigiD, which takes some effort, like five steps between two different sites and an app, but at least seems to be secure.
My Government message: you have a message from <organization>. Log in to <organization> portal to view message.
Me: Logging in to <organization> portal, again using DigiD (same steps).
<organization> portal message: There is a new document for you to download at My Documents in our portal.
Me: Wow, I don't even have to log in again, that's great! Document is not in the list, though. O, you have to select unread documents, otherwise you only get the old ones. Sure, makes sense.
Document: You student loan interest has been changed. We will send you your new monthly repayment amount soon.
Me: Great, glad I spent an hour finding out what was in that document...
Wow, he's right. The item name no longer appears on emailed receipts I receive from Amazon as of about late 2019 or early 2020. I can't think of a plausible explanation for this change other than preventing Google from pilfering your detailed purchase history. Thank you Amazon, I guess.
But who knows, making stuff up like you and I did isn't evidence. At best it gives you an idea of the range of possibilities.
I have not heard about regulations like what you're describing.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/technology/personal-data-...
I once talked to their customer service to ask how to stop getting the emails since they're basically entirely useless and they told me there's no way to do that.
The mails from Amazon.de in German do not contain any information about ordered items. From the same Amazon.de, to the same mail address, but in Czech, they do.
- Your order of X (confirmation)
- Your order of X has been dispatched
- Arriving today: X
- Delivered: Order number N
Only the last does not contain the product name X.
Anyone have a factual source that confirms that gmail is mining receipt data for advertising?
One refutation https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-gmail-purchases-priv... said in 2019 that Google’s Purchase’s page said “Google won't sell the [Purchases] information or use it to choose which ads you see”; however I did just log into Google and looked at https://myaccount.google.com/purchases and couldn’t find that text now, so who knows if that is still true.
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20067714 refers to a second refutation from 2017 - “Google Will No Longer Scan Gmail for Ad Targeting”.
Edit: I did read an article talking about other companies scanning receipts to target advertising, so that could be a motivation of Amazon’s.
Also there’s many ways to exploit the purchase data without ever selling it outside the company, including using it in aggregate for ad targeting without exposing specifics to the ad buyer.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/shop-package-order-tracker/id1...
I thought they were blocking an action that is kind of "opt out" and you're saying they might be blocking an "opt in" action. Neat to hear this before I got too confident in my position.
So looks like it is not yet globally at the same low standard, and might also be because of different laws.
I ordered something from Amazon today and a full description of the item I bought, including size and price, is in purchase confirmation email...
I bought some lightbulbs from Amazon recently. I am quite sure I purchased some 7-8 watt LED candle bulbs. I received a package of 50 watt incandescents, which was definitely not what I wanted. I went to my Amazon account and it showed I had purchased the incandescents. I looked at my email receipt, and all contained was is a list of links to Amazon, which led to their site, showing I had purchased the incandescents. The lack of text in the email meant I had no way to determine what I actually purchased and whether the mistake was on my end, Amazon's or the third party vendor.
Gmail hasn't mined data for commercial purposes for half a decade now. Someone at Amazon took dark-pattern customer engagement 101.
Specious....
Source: I have a data provider that scrapes your email when you use their 3rd party email app, and sells your purchase receipts downstream. Google has no reason to do this to you, but the industry as a whole is shady.
> newly minted MBA ex-consultant who’s just started working at Dropbox as a product manager: and here is my presentation about why it is imperative for us to expand from file synchronization and, for some reason, password management, into financial service integration through our automated financial information archival tool, and then ultimately into financial services, which will strengthen our moat against competition from other file synchronization services
I think this is largely part of why modern web services are getting more annoying and aggressive about monetization strategy -- a massive proportion of people in product these days seem to not be the sort of nerds-solving-real-world-problems who founded Dropbox, but someone coming from big consulting companies where the main output seems to be 300-slide presentations. It does not seem like they have much of an exposure to the more human-centric style of building a good product, but rely mostly on buzzwords and spreadsheets, because that ties in closely to what they did before.
I'd like to hear a counterargument from any ex-consulting product managers, or people who hire them though :)
That being said, the password management seems...okay to me? Services like 1Password already used Dropbox as a backend, so if you're paying Dropbox, it seems like a fair feature expansion for them to give you further reasons to keep using them since the space overhead is presumably trivial. You probably have a decent amount of sensitive data in there as well.
Now that they often are, you get the sense of being nickel-and-dimed every time you use the product. Maybe that's temporarily spiking the share price, but it's a really bad long-term strategy. You really don't want every product to descend into RyanAir pay-toilets-aboard-the-plane territory.
People use it. Wouldn't almost anyone love to fly in a private jet? Sure, but it has a cost.
The problem is that this fucking cross-financing infested hellscape of consumer web built on the abyss of advertisement sucks in almost everything , because "it's free" even though of course there's a hedonic quality adjustment to using a site crafted for a purpose that you pay for versus the same with endless dark pattens, freemium upsell hooks and ads ads ads. banners. modals (remember the fucking popups?) cookie consent "you are the product" dialogs.
but at the same time it's true that dismissing those modals and scrolling through ads takes a few seconds while paying for content takes more time and some actual money too.
I will say simple was a joy to work with, even for things that were old. I would never have closed on my house in time if not for them. Sadly- it seems that since BBVA -> PNC … everything historic for that account is gone.
Unrelated to banks:
Me: I’m calling because I got a notice that you’re cancelling my healthcare due to non payment of my premium?
Healthcare service line: yes. You had a responsibility to pay it and you didn’t so we cancelled it and we can’t change that decision for 12 months.
Me: but I have a confirmation of the payment from your digital pay system, and a bank statement that shows you have taken payments each month for the last several months.
Healthcare service line: I don’t see those on my end. You should have called to verify we received them. Maybe your credit card or checking account was stolen.
Me: but I can login to your website and it has the payment history.
Healthcare service line: hangs up.
As for BBVA->PNC, I had to get the CFPB involved just to get confirmation that my account was closed.
https://old.reddit.com/r/BBVABank/comments/pypk87/good_news_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/BBVABank/comments/r53cjt/it_was_ano...
The "courtesy" waiver of the fee for the opt-out paper statement not one Simple abductee asked for ends in April, so we'll see how that goes.
Eventually something happened that triggered a fee, which after two cycles put the account negative, at which point they were able to close the account and I paid the fees. (The balance had been very low as I had planned to close it but hadn’t before the BBVA->PNC transition!)
I’m Sorry you had to go through all that. It sounds incredibly frustrating.
But I miss simple so much as well. I miss how easy everything was. Even with my local credit union… who I would rank as okay, it took 10+ days and over a dozen emails to setup online banking.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/complaint/
It's like how people file complaints with the FCC to get action from monopoly ISPs.
Here's the thing: retail banking margin is actually quite low and customer support is expensive.
If you are someone who routinely calls your bank then your long-term value (LTV) is going to take a huge hit, so, of course banks want to keep everything as "low-touch" as possible.
A small anecdote: there were plenty of elderly people who were calling customer support every day to ask for their balance, because they did not trust the digital app. At some point, their calls started being routed to some chat-bot.
Customer support is also "embarrassingly outsource-able". The first layer of contact is usually done by someone who does not, in fact, work for "The Bank". They are actually employed by some huge contact center company who happens to have access to the bank's Salesforce CRM, and are instructed on how to solve most of complaints. It's only when they are faced with a very specific issue, that the ticket is then escalated to the in-bank operations team.
IIRC, we actually divide tickets in four categories: "L1, L2, L3 and L4". L1 and L2 are done by outsourced teams, L3 is usually the bank's operations squad, and L4 is the tech team with read-access to the database.
Is this because banks don't need retail money any more, since instead of acting as intermediaries between savers and borrowers, they now act as intermediaries between the Federal Reserve and borrowers, and only take savings because they're required to by law?
The reason why margin is low... is because you are the customer. I know many people feel "poor people are unbanked" and the industry is going in the direction to support them, but it also means banks have to find ways to get money from poor people and reduce costs everywhere possible.
Source: I used to work at a top 10 bank
Lucky them …
The reason is that this problem doesn't just apply to banks, it applies to every goddamn service I try to make contact with these days.
The systems are setup to waste a users time so only by showing a large commitment of time and emotional frustration can you get to talk to a human.
The net result is massive waste of everyone's time. It's a race to the bottom situation, and it's a societal problem, companies do it to compete.
But if your competition didn't do this hostile user gaslighting, then you wouldn't either. Or if instead of wasting 30 minutes average time before talking to someone with agency, the time was reduced to 5, or even 10 minutes.
I think the answer is regulation, that the mean or median average for time to speak to a live human should be no more than x (I propose 10 minutes), combined with an ombusdman to report companies that hide behind automated systems instead of do support, and if the average response time goes over allowed limit, or more than y percent of users report a company for not having a way to address their actual problem, then that company should pay a financial penalty, to it's users pro-rata. If the penalty is balanced, this way companies would actually share the cost of the people's time they are wasting.
This leads them to do things like those being discussed, where they take measures to reduce contacts without solving any real problems. Maybe if "customer satisfaction" were a more important metric than "CS budget," this would be better, but customer satisfaction is very hard to actually measure (how many of us even bother filling out surveys, and of those who do, how many are honest?).
I guess a lot of this boils down to "big company syndrome" where the customer experience is controlled by a series of interlocking factors, but the humans who control those factors are siloed and disincentivized to work together to improve things. My experience is that in most of these situations, people actually do have good intentions overall. You wouldn't believe the ways I've heard CS executives twist themselves into knots to convince people that outsourced or automated customer service is actually better for the customer (and I think they truly did believe it, or at least had fooled themselves into believing it). But the end result is bad for everyone.
So that when they try to externalize the costs they end up paying for it instead, enough to influence the business to change, to fix the root cause of the problem.
Here’s the thing: this statement un-ironically embodies everything wrong behind the article.
1. “If you” — where you are the provider of capital the bank makes money from, or interest payments the bank makes money from, or fees the bank makes money from, i.e., the source of the bank’s revenue
2. “are someone” — victim blaming
3. “who routinely calls” — aka, who experiences so much friction in trying to accomplish routine banking tasks, they are willing to endure the abuse of the bank’s “customer support”; aka, who is willing to be the canary in the coal mine about abjectly terrible process; aka, the gift of customer feedback with willingness to get to the bottom of the issue, such as, why does this issue exist, and/or, why does this issue cause a call, and what can be done to ensure the next time the customer either (a) doesn’t experience it, or (b) can resolve it themselves in an obvious way less painful than calling in.
3. “then your LTV is going to take a huge hit” — no, your (the customer’s) LTV didn’t change, the bank is unable to service you effectively. Your value for revenue generation is the same. The bank’s inability to service you lowers their RoE, or return on equity.
And …
> thrawaybanksup (18 hrs ago) - Disclaimer: I work in a bank and have worked closely with the customer support team.
4. Not throwaway bank CTO, not disclaiming but disclosing: I spent ~5 yrs as CTO for Americas at the 2nd largest bank in the free world, trying to help it grasp what I’m sharing here. Worked closely with not just the customer support team, but all teams. From what I observed, I’d suggest your post exemplifies almost the entire banking industry’s fundamental misunderstanding of how to enable customer success in ways that drive bank success.
So here’s the actual thing:
In general, “support” is called for in the face of in-ability, and it’s the bank that is failing to provide that ability, even in the case of a senior checking their balance.
(ASIDE: You say “works closely with” the support team. Could be you’re with tech, could be product, could be a number of groups — regardless, the framing is that of customer service as cost center. So this post is addressing the customer service team or role. Moving on…)
Reframe everything you wrote imagining, for a moment, that customer success was a legitimate goal, and you may be able to hear how tone deaf support-as-cost-center is:
5. “Customer support is embarrassingly outsourceable” — Rephrase as “customer success is embarrassingly outsourceable” … Suddenly that doesn’t sound right, does it?
That sounds like someone somewhere isn’t doing a job.
For instance, since winning product management involves customer journey, customer experience, and reducing friction, why is “customer support” considered a cost center ripe for cost avoidance, and not signal priority one for product development?
L1, L2, L3, L4 — no product team in there anywhere, as if the errors are a technology team issue rather than a product usability fail!
Ouch.
Banking is still run by a vast “frozen middle” of management whose jobs depend on a flat refusal to accept any of the above.
In the rare example such as the bank called “Simple” which initially got it better, the few who figured that out will get gobbled up by a bigger bank that doesn’t get it seeking growth or returns or technology, folded into the larger bank’s operations, thereby destroying the difference never recognized — actually rejected — by a majority of the acquirer’s middle or even senior management team.
Sorry, @thrawaybanksup, you cannot outsource customer success. It’s a way of thinking, not middle or back office, or operations, or support. The bank in the customer’s experience, in the customer’s head, is the reality. It’s the bank that succeeds or fails.
Fight to elevate the support team’s role to help “solve the problem at the left”, a tight feedback loop prioritizing work where the product decisions are made, so terrible customer experience doesn’t get shoveled out back to bury a disempowered call agent, it lands on those responsible for the experience.
Help “Management” grasp the surprisingly effective concept that “support” redefined as “success” both improves margins and reduces support expense when driving simplifying the experience.
2. (again) “If you are someone who routinely calls your bank…” — No. Just no. Instead: If you are a bank which gets routinely called! …
This is all on the bank.
Missing: Q: "So can I just walk into one of those zillion bank branches you've set up in the last 10 years, squatting on all that storefront real estate that could be used for real businesses that sell me something, attract tourists, or whatever?"
A: "No, they're just for show. We don't actually do any business there, we just rent that space to piss you all off, as a visible display of what we can do with all those excessive fees we charge you."
The only time you get any service is when you are looking to saddle yourself with debt or they have to comply due to regulations.
First I was told to withdraw the remaining funds to get the balance to zero. Before I did that, I asked them if doing so would automatically close the account without incurring some kinds of fees? crickets
Then I was promised when I got ahold of their specific account closing department that I would be sent a small cashiers check for the small balance I kept in there to avoid incurring fees. Never arrived.
Then I kept getting calls for someone with a different name from the bank. I eventually figured out they were trying to call about this issue, but literally has a completely different name that made no sense.
When I called them back anojt it to close the account again, I was told I needed to go to a branch. Well, all branches are closed due to Covid. Then I have to call again, well, there is a specific branch that is open - great! Too bad I couldn’t find it via the branch locator the first time.
Go to that specific branch - closing an account requires an appointment.
Me: Ok, when is the next appointment?
Them: since you’re closing an account, you need a specific kind of rep. The soonest appointment is a week from now.
Them: but you can close the account by withdrawing funds to zero
Me: will that actually close the account without incurring some kind of negative balance due to fees?
Them: looks nervous uh no
Me: I see, it’s almost like you all are trying to get me to not actually close my account due to some incentive structure and tack on fees. I’m about this close from suing you in small claims court for not actually letting me close my account.
Them: look at each other super nervously ehem, I can book that appointment for you.
Me: ok
And somehow, when I get home after this, I get a text that my account has actually been closed and the cashiers check gets in my hand through the mail before the actual appointment they scheduled me.
It’s just adding bullshit process to provide friction to keep some metric up near as I can tell.
See: Bank of America's policy on two-party "and" checks.
I walk in, having had a checking account with them for decades: "Hi, I need to deposit a two-party check into my account here. This is the other party with me, and we're happy to show ID."
Door greeter / agent: "Sure, I can do that for you." {Proceeds to verify my information and set up deposit on her tablet} "Hmm." {Walks over to her manager, discusses}
Manager: "Hello. I'm sorry, we only allow two-party checks to be deposited into joint accounts that list both parties."
Me: "I have the other party standing right here, with ID."
Manager: "That's our policy. Even if I pushed it through, the central system would kick it back out."
... which is a policy they can have. But the annoyance to me, is that it's a policy they choose to have, rather than a policy they're required to have. Corrections welcome, but there's no law that mandates this handling of two-party "and" checks. It's just risk mitigation on BoA's part.
Which, if a multi-decade relationship with your customer doesn't facilitate taking additional risk (over a <$1k check) in the interest of customer satisfaction... why would I do business with you?
Needless to say, I closed my BoA accounts.
Incidentally a BoA teller just told me yesterday that the phone all is not supposed to accept two party checks at all.
Actually, it is supposed to.
The 1990's-era legislation that made phone deposits possible shifted the liability and some other regulatory details a bit to make it possible. The verification and liability is less strict with an online deposit than an in-person deposit.
At the time, it was a big news story. The rule change was originally intended to allow businesses to deposit checks from their offices with a device over a modem for speed and security.
When it was in the news, people were up in arms because it shifted the liability for certain types of fraud onto the consumer, and away from the banks. Consumer advocates saw it as a big money-grab by the evil mustache-twirling bankers.
The result is that now when you get something like a random unexpected electric company refund check in the mail, you can deposit it with your phone.
Funny thing is she was able to open the account without input from me so I'm not sure what this policy is actually doing.
I've read a number of BoA horror stories on HN, and didn't think anything of them. I just assumed there were a lot because BoA is big in California.
Then, recently, I tried to deal with BoA customer service.
- I'm saving up a few thousand dollars for a Christmas present, but don't want my wife to see the money in our joint account at another bank.
- Since I have BoA credit card with almost nothing on it, and a BoA next door, I decided to open a savings account.
- End of the month, I go online to pay my BoA credit card, and I can't. There is no way on the web site to pay with anything other than the savings account, and no way to re-add my previous external account that I've used with BoA for the last 10 years.
- Call customer service. Wait on hold for three hours, getting transferred twice.
- Finally get someone at BoA to tell me that because I added the savings account, my status changed and I have to add new payment accounts all over.
- Explain again that there is no way to add an external payment account.
- Two more transfers, and someone confirms that the web site is screwed up. Hold on while I transfer you to that department.
- 20 minutes later, someone comes on the line to tell me that tech customer service doesn't work on Saturdays anymore and to check back in a few days and maybe it will magically fix itself.
- I decide to go to the branch. Open BoA app to check its hours, and it's marked "Temporarily closed." So is the next closest BoA. And the one after that. The nearest BoA that is going to be open on Monday is two hours away, according to the app.
- Monday I go out for coffee, which takes me past the BoA branch next door. It's open. People inside. Everything looks normal, contrary to the app telling me it's supposed to be closed.
- I go into the branch, pay off my BoA card, empty the savings account, close both accounts.
Bank of America doesn't deserve to represent itself as the bank of America. It should be called the Bank of Dipshits.
Oh, this story is quintessential US Americana, right down to the name.
I've long maintained that one of the biggest gifts to US corporations is how few of their customers visit other countries. If more of them ever saw functional banking (or humane healthcare, or competitive telephony and broadband, or a number of other things), a lot of rents would evaporate.
Then I wondered if the video game character's name is derived from the vacuum company, or is it a coincidence? Am I an idiot for never noticing that before?
Like most of my trains of thought, it ends with me cursing myself for being an idiot.
Then at one point I was between jobs and filed for unemployment - which conveniently came on a BofA debit card. 10 years later and I still get an email about some kind of monthly statement for the $0.43 on there. I tried to close out the account and gave up after several attempts, and just marked it as spam.
Don't set up a payment option on the credit card's website. Use the bill pay ability at the web site of the bank where your checking account lives. Now all your payment information is in one place and, more importantly, under your control via pushing payments from your checking to whomever instead of allowing a bunch of companies to pull money from your account.
The problem isn't necessarily with the policy as such; it's perhaps an entirely sensible policy to have – I don't even know what a "two-party and check" is so have no opinion on that as such – but the real problem is that there is no way a human applying basic "common sense" judgement can override the policy.
A lot of things are now like this: "this is the rule", "computer says no", with little recourse. The complexity of reality can't be captured in a rulebook or computer program, so lots of people in different "unusual" (although they're usually not that unusual) situations hit brick walls for a lot of basic stuff.
It's slowly crushing out collective souls and stripping us of our humanity.
Q: Well, at least I can still withdraw and deposit money there, right?
A: Actually, if you want to deposit coinage, we've outsourced that to home improvement stores instead.
(At least, that’s what Coinstar in the US has become.)
> A: "No, they're just for show. We don't actually do any business there...
This is what I don't get about BECU being the most popular credit union in Puget Sound. Every time there's a thread on Reddit asking about the credit unions people use or if there's a newcomer who's at a social gathering or just on Twitter, BECU is always the recommended place. I don't understand, since their branches are solely there to sell you a mortgage.
Yet everyone is mad that Chase is opening branches all over town where you can do actual banking with an actual human.
(I'm neither a Chase nor BECU customer, for what it's worth.)
Do you mind if I ask what BECU can't do in a branch? I'm genuinely curious because your experience seems so different from mine.
you: if I don’t give you a good rating in this survey will you get fired?
customer service agent: yes”
This particular aspect of modern society really bothers me
I'm not one of those of those though. I like my CS people to be able to do their jobs to keep the inevitable discruption to a customer's day minimized.
In the place I'm at, my Call Center is one of the happiest groups in the company. So many other places I've been that wasn't the case, do I made damn sure to deliver the best impl possible when I got the chance to oversee it.
To get your metrics right, you don't want your queues doing weird things, because it's hard enough making sure you have enough bodies to keep the queue times short enough your customers will even bother.
I put particular emphasis on getting my Call Center people exactly what they need to do their jobs quickly, because I don't see them as sunk cost, but an incestment in customer goodwill. Present a good face to the public, and be able to handle their problems, and they will either stick around or come back.
It's an interesting piece of technology to set up and QA. The meeting of telephony and Internet is a section of tech I like to dabble in, because phones are cool.
On the occasions where I get assigned a clown, I have no problem giving the appropriate rating there either.
However:
(1) Most of the times, the problem does not get solved, requiring follow ups, but the surveys do not allow for marking that. This allows the representatives to set the problem aside without resulting in negative feedback for them.
(2) Many times, the representatives are helpless in solving the problem which has its roots in company's policies. (E.g., deletion of older digital statements in the OP). Giving a poor rating to the representative would not solve the real problem.
Both of the above can be fixed by having more options in the survey, but they don't include them.
They usually offer 100% of the same services but with lower (or no) fees, and with far less bullshit. I've been a member of multiple CUs and every time I've had a problem, I just walked in, described the situation, and they just fixed it. If I call, I don't get bounced around to 3 departments, at worst I end up being transferred to a manager who actually has the power to fix the problem.
Every time I decided to try a bank instead of a credit union, I have regretted it.
Imagine how insane I'd sound if I said the reverse in response to a comment you made about a bank in Europe, on a thread of comments about banks in Europe, to an article about banks in Europe, hosted on a website in Europe, visited primarily by Europeans.
I am not a customer of one, but I assume that using a CU instead of a bank is like using Linux on your desktop instead of Windows.
The shareholders of a credit union are by law/definition its customers/depositors.
The shareholders of a bank can be anyone.
And, unfortunately, small credit unions are finding it harder and harder to compete given the necessary investments to keep current technologically and meet new regulations.
I recently needed to make several medical appointments with a large healthcare provider. They had FOUR different online portals to "manage" my appointments and information. Navigating that was the exact same experience as the article, just without an actual person.
This, a thousand times. It irks me when companies insist on fucking with a product that was good enough already.
At that point, they should scale down, sell it to an income fund and move on.
But no. The growth-hungry VCs ruin the product and alienate their previously-loyal customers.
Also, considering that I'm listening to a talk about the computational complexity of economic planning on the side, the "we should recreate the entire financial system from first principles" part felt like a rude yet completely deserved callout.
Ooo, sounds interesting! Link?
Fwiw, I don't think economic planning is or was the main problem of socialism, more the information gathering that precedes it or the mechanism design that comes after, but I have a soft spot in my heart for anyone engaging productively with alternatives to capitalism, even if they aren't particularly fleshed out.
Select email, name from users where deleted == falseFirst of all, the system operates on a complaint basis - they're not interested in being handed evidence of GDPR breaches, they're only "interested" (in quotes because the entire process feels like they're being forced to do something and do the bare minimum, as opposed to genuinely caring about protecting & defending citizens' privacy) in complaints where you didn't get your way. Imagine if the police wasn't interested in the location of a wanted, violent criminal and turned people away with "come back when you've actually been shot by him".
The complaints process puts the burden of investigating, documenting the breach and verifying further compliance onto you. It is extremely admin-heavy and requires you to first argue with the company and give them 30 days (more in certain specific scenarios) to respond, so a malicious actor can drag out the process for months before you can even proceed with a complaint to the regulator, and once the regulator takes action it is up to you to assess whether they now comply, and if not, go through the whole process again.
Finally, if you've made it through thus far and actually have a valid complaint that doesn't give these lazy idiots a technicality to use as an excuse to close your complaint, it'll rot in a queue for months, and when it actually gets processed and actioned, the only outcomes I've had so far (including for a company clearly acting in bad faith and probably breaking more laws than just the GDPR) is the ICO sending a letter which the company can ignore in total impunity, with the real-world penalty for ignoring it being another letter.
Imposing such a "penalty" obviously requires going through this whole process again so in the real-world very few people will make it this far to begin with, let alone following up on further non-compliance.
I'm also doubtful of their technical proficiency so I'm afraid they can trivially be defeated by the company using some technobabble to justify why they can't delete accounts if there's no expert on hand to debunk the BS excuses.
It is a war of attrition in which the regulator (at least in the UK) is in cahoots with the enemy.
The sorts of companies that don't have an online mechanism to delete your account are the same kinds of companies that have never heard of, or don't care about the the GDPR.
I've always wondered whether GDPR just closed their eyes on that, or if it was so that the process of later restoring data was flagrant enough that it would be hard to hide upon inspection...
However, if you can develop an in-person face-to-face rapport with someone at a bank, you'll find that they can bypass, sometimes, much of the infuriating petty bureaucracy.
I once had a bank employee print almost a ream of statements on the spot for me. I was almost in tears from the generosity of their time and effort. This was after going to a different branch an being told it would cost hundreds of dollars and take weeks because it was a "back-office" job.
You never know when you might need them.
Also, ALWAYS be nice to janitors, maids, maintenance staff, front desk people, security guards, etc.
You should make anyone with access to a set of keys your friend.
Plus there's a difference between "be nice" and "go the extra effort to be nice". You can be perfectly friendly and nice and you can strike up some chit-chat and develop a low-key "relationship" with someone.
Stockholm Syndrome. Tears of gratitude for a bank employee paid for their time and effort bypassing standard procedure says more than the article.
I knew that I needed someone to cut through bullshit red-tape for me. The first branch didn't do it, so I went to another and was lucky enough to find someone who wasn't a rule-following robot.
On to calling international to Etrade customer service, at 5am local time ..... "The call backlog is approximately 60 minutes" ..... 45 minutes in I get hung up on .... call back .... "The call backlog is approximately 90 minutes" .... 60 minutes in this time I get hung up on .....
That as my last week, how was yours?
I don't even know why is this a thing (i.e. who had to sacrifice himself to the gods of IT interoperability so that a lot of banks offered this) , but all of these formats are actually very well documented these days. It's a GOD. SEND. that even the most terrible of banks seems to offer this, double plus good when no one at the bank even knows what "Quicken" is.
Hahahaha!
I wish this weren't true.
Customer: I don't live in the US anymore, how can I close my bank account?
1 week later...
Bank: Sorry for the delay, we were unable to answer your question in time but assume that you have found the answer already and closed the ticket.
Customer: Repeats the question.
Bank: To close an account you need to come in person to one of our branches that are only in a few states in the USA.
She still has the back account.
A few years ago I had to review transactions for tax purposes, but I couldn't because they only let me go back 12 months. Even now my bank only goes back 3 years, while Amazon still has my order history from 1999.
The author’s issue comes down to banks being apparently uninterested in attracting business by solving actual customer pain points. Instead of solving real problems (terrible UX around a lack of statements, a malicious USB stick can drain your bank account, etc) the banks mostly just appear to trend chase (chat app! Crypto!).
Discover customer service is fantastic, with friendly interactive humans. I feel bad that Discover is not my main bank - I was going that way until a binding arbitration clause (with unreasonably short opt-out period) derailed the relationship. Ally is adequate, with the "standard" humans emulating robots relying on a case system. They will promise to call/email you back but never will, so you have to poll. Capital One 360 is at or below Ally - I had a poor experience with them settling an IRA, but they're ending their IRA business so who knows.
Unfortunately the Discover web / app is the worst of the three (although they support OFX Direct Connect last time I checked). Ally and Cap1 are nice (although there are some things you cannot do through the Cap1 web interface until you find a hidden link to the old web interface, which is still partially active). One standout feature of Cap1 is that you can open a reasonable line of credit for overdraft protection, if you don't generally have enough cash sitting around in an adjacent savings account.
P.S. I tried Alliant CU but was not impressed by their web interface or the hoops required to login to the app. Customer service seemed okay. Maybe in a different life.
P.P.S. Ally Invest is a completely separate creature from Ally Bank. I've had two different horrendous experiences with Ally Invest, and urge everyone to steer clear. The reps sound like they know what they're talking about (holdovers from TradeKing I presume), but are completely disconnected from the back office's procedures or activities.
What a coincidence.
Last month, my wife called Cap1 to close two department store credit card accounts she hasn't used in years.
This morning, I'm doing the bills and in the letters are two from Cap1 welcoming her to her new department store credit cards, here are all the terms and rates, and here's your first bill for $0. Happy spending!
I too was satisfied with my Cap1 cc account(s), tried their banking, and it was a total disaster. I eventually got my money out (through two systems that had been deprecated and closed down, with no apparen't notice to me), and left $10 in one account that still has paper statements - but no ability to sign in to the account any more.
I leave it alone to spite them.
As I said, the banks just love to sell you money at a very nice profit. What is the interest rate on those CCs? Is it anywhere near the current 'zero interest rate'?
> bank: sir this conversation is recorded but I blinked my eyes very slowly twice
I laughed out loud at that.
Edit: Also, I never realized why Amazon stopped putting the name of the thing I purchased on the email receipt. Now it makes sense.
Can you enlighten me? Why don’t they include that in the email receipt?
Also, your comments seem to be auto-dead for the last couple days. Glancing at your comment history, I'm not sure why. I vouched to recover this one. You might want to check in with Dan (hn@ycombinator.com) and ask him what's up.
Else maybe the EU needs to make some new laws again. :-/
"No we won't do the one thing you need us to do, even though it is extremely simple and easy"
"Hey would you like to try this thing we spent a billion dollars on, you definitely don't need it but it's very trendy"
Strikes me that there is potential here for businesses to genuinely make customer service their focus, at the expense of profit or maybe by offering their services at a slightly higher premium. The Groundhog Day cycle of doom that we all feel all the time is deeply damaging to everyone concerned apart from shareholders. It'd be a breath of fresh air if companies went back to focusing on their customers first and foremost.
Note that they’re all primarily investment brokers that sometimes offer banking like services.
I'm curious if Amazon uses different formatting depending on the recipient's email address?
I use Fastmail and checked my order confirmation (not sure if that is the same as a recipt) from a recent order, and it does not list the item I bought. However, at the bottom it does have a "Customers Who Bought Items In Your Order Also Bought" section which lists a couple similar items to mine.
Do they still have that on the ones send to gmail?
"Hi, it's Amazon. We have shipped your order #udid. But you need to sign in to the app on your phone, and click through multiple screens, to figure out which item it is. Because you know, it's a $35 billion ad business for us."
What happened to Amazon always being consumer first?
Update: If Amazon offered a setting ("display item details in email?"), I would have no complaints. They can default to opt-out, and give it some self serving Apple-esque bullshit name like "Protect your data from third parties", I would be okay with all that.
It worked
Amazon are 'obsessed' with (their milking of) the customer (and anyone else they can).
> customer service agent: yes
you: if I give negative feedback on the survey will any bank procedures change?
customer service agent: no
/me gives good marks because the agent was friendly, despite having no ability to accomplish things and the effective memory of a goldfish with a ticket system.
This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but to the sound of hold music.
4 months, 3 separate calls, 5 separate email threads.
Even getting them to understand the problem is a huge challenge.
It's just a fucking database entry for godsake. 30 years in to the IT revolution and most businesses are still hopeless.
Trying to tweet a link to this, Twitter being like : "We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more."
This cannot be an uncommon scenario (and yet it's happened to me so many times): April 1 rolls around, ok time to do taxes, let's start by reviewing my bank transactions for the previous calendar year -- whoops! No data for January - March because those are months 13, 14, and 15.
Total insanity.
I suspect this is so they don't have to spend lots of time (without compensation) dealing with buckshot demands due to IRS audits. By the time your tax returns are audited, they've deleted all the statements relevant to the year being audited.
Obviously all the transaction data is still there in their computers, but I suspect that if it isn't accountholder-accessible it's easier for the bank to say "we're not dealing with you unless our regulator or a court says we have to". Either of those routes ensures the IRS has to waste roughly as much time/money as the bank does.
Excellent, my job here is done.
I also love the absolute nailing of startup/tech culture.
I’ve never had any issues with them.
Avoid national and multi-national banks at all costs. You are nothing to those banks and they will treat you like it.
For example, this week I needed some cost basis information on a transfer between accounts with unlike registration. Couldn't get it online. I emailed them. They responded via secure message with exactly what I wanted in 2 business days.
2 days to receive answer to a simple question? Responded via secure message? What does that entail?
FWIW, I also think Fidelity has fantastic customer service, especially in-person. It’s their differentiator and competitive advantage. Wouldn’t be surprised if OPs question was not simple at all.
Is this a reference to something specific (like the Venmo reference later on), or just to poor security practices and data exposures in general?
Until a US startup uses VC capital to somehow break the U.K. system, spending 10 years being a loss leader, then using its new market position to devolve U.K. technology to the mess the US has.
Governmental policy dictated by social media forces controlled by herds of solipsists I wouldn't trust to scratch their own arses.
With the power of distributed censorship. All of the dystopia but with nobody personally responsible for "being the hitler".
With fun tools like "shadowbanning". Which censors you without telling you why you were censored. Or even that you were censored.
And secret forbidden word lists!
We're augmenting the powers of insects with digital technology. This only creates giant insects.
All systems have their limits, but the current electronic ones are much better than the mortar and paper of yesteryear. I just finished renewing tags for my cars in 5 minutes from the comfort of my home, as compared to 2 hour Tag Office visit 20 years ago. (Happy bday to me!).
Actually with more steps.
Paper statements:
Bank generates paper statement on appointed day (work/time input by bank)
Bank packages paper statement in envelope and mails it (work/time input by bank)
Postal service delivers paper statement to my mailbox (work/time input by postal service)
I open paper statement (work/time input by me)
I scan paper statement (work/time input by me) (also can be optional if one prefers simply filing paper statements)
Electronic statement PDF's on bank website:
Bank (maybe) sends an email saying "your statement is ready"
I receive the email
I have to now open my password manager (work/time by me)
I have to log into bank website (work/time input by me)
I have to navigate to the "download your statement area" (which was designed to make the process of accessing the electronic statement as obtuse as possible) (work/time input by me)
I have to download the pdf (hopefully one click for me, but still a bit of work/time by me)
I have to rename the downloaded pdf to fit my filing convention (since, at best, it downloads as "statement.pdf" from the bank)
The major time input on my part with paper statements is the "scan" part, all the rest happens without any involvement of time, energy, or remembering it is "time" on my part.
The electronic statement download requires I actively expend time and effort to "go to their website, log in, find the download section, find the statement, and initiate the download".
What I want to see, but no bank offers it, is exactly the same flow as the paper/postal service, but substituting "email" for "postal service" and "pdf" for "paper". I upload a GPG public key, bank does the work of encrypting the pdf using my key and emailing me a copy (which makes "electronic statement" the same as paper, they do the work of remembering it is time and initiating the transmission). Then I save the pdf attachment from the email, decrypt it, and file it (saving the "scan" step from the paper copy flow).
*unless the bank changes something about their email/website/pdf and that breaks the script
Now they're squeezing their won retail customers to look like they're doing something.
True story
This may be the best line I've read all year.
My particular moment of truth was when I noticed that my Pacific Bell cell phone bills stopped arriving. The first month, the USPS could possibly be to blame, but the second month, I called Customer Service to figure out what was going on.
So, first question, last 4 digits of your SSN. Answer, as ever: 1234. Eh, no, WRONG, try again!? Eh, yes, my SSN ends in 1234?! No, sorry, it does not, I cannot talk to you, bye!
Eh, yes, okay... So, try again the next day, hopefully that agent will be more clued in? Nope, no way, disconnected again.
So, visited the PacBell store near my office. Same thing, the person in the store is, like, visibly shaken after checking my account. can't do anything to help me, can't tell me what is wrong.
TL;DR: my cell phone got disconnected (most likely for nonpayment) after another month or so. Tried to sign up with AT&T, but got denied, because my 'nonpayment' was already recorded on my credit file, so, yeah.
Ended up calling every number in the PacBell SoCal range, and finally got through to someone who took pity on me and was willing to listen to me, and got my account and credit restored.
A few months later, PacBell drained my account by issuing hundreds of direct debit orders for my monthly cellphone bill. They eventually stopped doing that, but never reimbursed me for any overdraft fees. I was almost evicted due to bounced checks because of this, but nobody cared.
I've lived most of my life therefore and after in the EU, and while life here definitely is not perfect, I've NEVER had trivial issues like the above almost cause me to be homeless. So, I guess there's a startup idea in there somewhere? /s
do I laugh or cry now?
like any market, there are competently run companies and there are terrible ones (e.g. HSBC)
You're just gonna leave us hanging like that?
sorry :)
Otherwise, this was a completely wasted/pointless use of electrons.
Credit Unions are usually hyper-local or for special interest groups so you'd need to look around by you.
The only downside that I've run into is that they don't have branches that take cash deposits.
At a certain size you just become too big to be competent, and the incentives get FUBAR. After that they don't really care about customer satisfaction because they're really focused on investors or the next 1mm corporate customers.
Of course, we're talking about thousands of small institutions, they're going to vary wildly.
Crypto has issues but banks are worse.