Brothers In Blog

By the headline of this story you might draw the conclusion that this is nothing more than another story about Bank of America issuing credit cards to illegal aliens. While I do hope that the US Attorney General finds BOA in violation of banking laws and slams the door on this practice, I have a more personal gripe with the nation’s second largest bank. About once a month my wife and I take our 5-year old daughter to the mall where she has a routine of riding the large carousel and the 50-cent rides typical of the ones outside your local grocery store. Grasping a small Ziploc bag with roughly $6 in dimes and nickels, we stop at the neighborhood BOA so she can turn them in for quarters. Now, my wife and I have both savings and checking accounts with BOA and our daughter even has her own savings account whose balance has often times exceeded my own thanks to very generous relatives at Christmas and Birthdays.

The parking lot is nearly full so my wife elects to wait in the car while my daughter and I head inside. The line isn’t as bad as last week when their computers were down, but it’s still about a 15-minute wait until we get our turn. I lift my daughter up so she can sit on the counter and she hands the bag to the teller with the biggest smile I’ve ever seen. The teller smiles back and then asks her co-worker if these need to be rolled. I couldn’t help but interrupt by remarking, “You have got to be kidding!” Her co-worker confirms my fears and tells her she must roll them before they can accept them. The teller hands back the bag to my daughter who is no longer smiling and doesn’t even offer to provide us with the coin wrappers. I remove my daughter from the counter and let the teller know that I’ll be closing ALL my accounts with BOA. The teller could care less. To her I’m just one less customer she has to bother with. What really gets me is that they have the coin counting machine behind them that does all the work for them. What would it hurt to run my little girl’s coins through?

I think back to the days when I opened my first bank account and proudly carried in my savings book to have the deposit of a birthday check or proceeds from lemonade stand recorded. The tellers were always so courteous and they valued EVERY customer no matter how young. In those days the only reason people changed banks was because they moved. Service wasn’t an issue because we knew what the word meant and it was still important to the customer. When manufacturing jobs moved overseas we were told not to fear because the United States was going to be a service-oriented nation. Well, to this former Bank of America customer, it seems that service is going south too.

Bret’s 2-Cents:

Customer service? At a bank? Oh please! Don’t get me wrong, customer service isn’t dead, it just doesn’t exist in the banking industry. I recall a recent experience our parents had when trying to cash a Traveler’s Check. Being still fairly “old school” (or old “skool” if you’re really hip), they still use Traveler’s Checks when they travel. Unfortunately, when they tried to have a bank “cash” the Traveler’s Check, they were turned down because they didn’t have an account there. Obviously someone forgot to inform the Teller that a Traveler’s Check was just as good as cash. I guess that part of Teller orientation was removed from the manual along with general principals of customer service. Doh!