You would think that banks would realize the importance of customer experience and how it influences bad PR. However, our recent experience with Bank of America was so bad that I felt moved to blog about it using my media platform. The beauty of freedom of speech! Use it because it is your right.
On April 15, 2010 we contacted Bank of America because we transferred payments from two online Pay Pal sales that the purchaser says were not authorized. Of course, we immediately refunded the purchaser his money back because he said he did not authorize the chargers.
Our major concern was because we have different accounts setup with Bank of America and the account that the PayPal transfer was sent to would not have enough funds to cover the charges. This is what we told Bank of America on April 15, 2010. Bank of America advised us to have PayPal transfer the fee amount to cover the charge. Which on April 16, 2010 PayPal did!
Again, we contacted Bank of America on April 16, 2010! To ensure we would not have overdraft fees. They told us because PayPal did the transfer and it did cover the balance we were fine. However, we also informed them that we noticed two pending overdraft fees on that particular account. They told us we would ONLY need to call back the next day when the overdraft fees cleared and they would gladly remove them.
So on April 17, 2010 we called back to have the overdraft fees removed. We were told that there was nothing in their notes to reflect to remove the overdraft charges! OMG! They put us on hold for 15 plus minutes or more because they said a Supervisor would have to review our account. No Supervisor returned to the phone, it was the same person who told us that the fees could not be removed. At that point we requested that they grant us the common courtesy to at least speak with a Supervisor.
After an additional extra 10 minutes we spoke with a Supervisor who identified himself as Jason in the Southeast Region for Bank of America, Small Business. He was extremely unprofessional and purposely rude to us. It was extremely sad and disappointing to have a banking manager speak to us in this manner.
Additionally, Jason stressed that Bank of America notes did not say anything about overdraft charges would be removed. He related that Bank of America notes only showed that we called in on April 15 and 16, nothing else! What an amazing communications system they have!