Bank of America Update

The saga continues...

(For an account more detailed than you may want of my three-month-long attempts to pay my Bank of America credit cards online, see the previous post.)

A friend advised that I direct a tweet to BofA_Help, which, with some technical assistance, I must confess, I managed to do. A day or two and a few tweets back and forth later, I received a phone call from a customer service rep who expressed great concern for my concern, but who could offer me no further information on the problem. I made my displeasure known. I was then contacted by a senior customer service representative, the first time by voicemail, where she left her direct line.

When I was able to call her back, she immediately disarmed me by telling me that Bank of America would be sending me a $50 Exxon Mobile gift card for my trouble. She further informed me that the log-on issue I'd been having was projected to be fixed by February 12th. I was so stunned by getting a direct answer that some of the obvious questions did not occur to me.

Why should it have taken me so many phone calls and so much vitriol to get what really should have been a simple answer? Though I still have questions about the competence of a bank that takes this long to get their database to operate properly, would it have been so hard to make sure that all of their customer service representatives knew definitively that the problem was being worked on and that there was a target date to fix it? Or at least that they all understood that there was a problem? Has no one considered a notification on the web site, for crying out loud, if nothing more than for the sake of the sanity of the poor customer service representatives who had to listen to my tirades?

Of course, it is possible that their faith in that target date is so shaky that they would prefer it not be made public unless they absolutely can't avoid it. It's also possible that the problem was NOT being addressed until they faced the peril of being called out on Twitter.

Either way, I now have an answer that is at least semi-satisfying, and a gas card to boot. But I can't help feeling sorry for those other customers in the same boat who are still in the dark because they aren't as stubborn and argumentative as I am.

If I'm sounding a little high-maintenance here, rest assured that this is not truly the case. Had I been a little more self-serving, at least one question would have occurred to me when the senior rep asked me if there was anything else she could do for me today: Could we see about lowering this interest rate?