I’ve been behind on payments to a Bank of America credit card for a while. My own fault, these things happen. The automated phone calls were annoying (but then, they’re supposed to be), but I just had to make sure I had money available to give the bank. Today I had that money, so on lunch I wandered down to a local BoA branch and handed them an even hundred dollars.
In order to make sure that the credit department knew about the payment, I had been instructed to call their 800 number and then dial an extension to speak to a representative regarding my account. Once I got home from work (since I didn’t have the information with me at work), I gave them a call. After sitting through the oh-so-cheery “We’re here to help!” recorded message, I was prompted to enter my extension. I did so…and was promptly disconnected.
Um…okay. Let’s try that again.
Dial. Annoyingly cheerful message. Prompt. Punch in the extension.
Disconnect.
Now I’m definitely annoyed. I dial back a third time, this time just sitting and waiting for an associate to answer. One does, I give them my information, and that much is taken care of. However, during that annoyingly cheerful message I’d just listened to three times, another 800 number had been given so customers could call and give any concerns with the service that they had just received. Since being unceremoniously kicked offline a few times had gotten under my skin, I figured it was worth letting them know.
So, I call the second 800 number…and sit on hold. For ten minutes. With a recorded “We’ll be right with you!” message playing in my ear every twenty seconds. Now, I know that these messages are a good thing overall, in that they do assure you that you haven’t been dropped from the system and that you will be taken care of eventually, but the frequency of the message got pretty grating after a while. Still, on the grand scheme of things, that was fairly minor.
Eventually, the phone is answered. I explain to the girl what had just happened to me, and she then informs me that if there’s nobody at a particular extension when it’s dialed, the system disconnects. Well, okay, that seems like a really bad design decision, but I can accept it. Still, I let her know that it might help in the future if there were some form of recorded message letting the customer know that that extension was not currently active before they were disconnected, or possibly have the system re-route back to the main line, instead of just dropping the caller without any indication of what was going on.
At which point she starts to argue with me.
Apparently, I just hadn’t understood what she had just told me. I tried to assure her that I understood what she had said perfectly well, I just thought that there might be a better way to go about things.
And she continues to argue with me.
I tried to explain that I had been given this number by their system in order to report customer service issues, and that I was only trying to pass on a suggestion in order to improve things for other customers later on down the line.
And she continued to argue with me.
At that point I gave up, snapped “Never mind,” and hung up on her, mid-babble.
I was tempted to call back to the customer service hotline in order to complain about the girl who’d just helped me, but I hadn’t caught her name, and I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about sitting on hold for another ten minute listening to the system assure me that they’d be with me “soon” every twenty seconds.
Bank of America will get their money, as fast as I can get it to them without risking my health or home — and I’ll be very happy not to do business with them in the future.
“Be There (Tormentor)” by Tall Paul from the album Duty Free (1999, 5:24).