I live in Texas but have customers in Arkansas, Chicago, and other areas of the country. That's why I opened an account at Bank of America. My partners also opened an account there to cover our business needs. I have a lot of experience with nationwide banks. They are so convenient when you travel for ATMs and helping out in a pinch. However, that's where the convenience ends.
"Customer service" is one of those business terms flung about without any real meaning. Is customer service greeting all customers with a smile? Sure. Is it still customer service when the same smiling person is telling me "no"? That's been my experience at Bank of America. They have a software system for deposits that will automatically put deposits on hold if the account and deposit doesn't meet certain standards. Theoretically, this makes sense because banks do lose a lot of money from bad deposits and fraud. I worked at a bank for six years and I'm very familiar with the risks that banks take as well as the costs related to running an efficient bank. However, this software system does one thing to Bank of America, it turns branch employees into nay-saying drones.
Customer service is more than just greeting people and performing policy-based pre-approved tasks. It's making sure a customer is happy with the end-result of any interaction. That is not easy because customers are hard to please and they demand a lot, but it's their money and they should. It's easy to forget that customers are people. Executive management sits in meeting rooms and discuss customers as part of demographics, market share, and profit and loss statements. It dehumanizes customers in a way similar to Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs calls his victims "it".
"It puts the lotion on." or "It puts the money in the bank." Same thing.
This is important because as soon as companies see customers as either negative or positive dollar signs, they forget that they are people.
This brings me back to Bank of America. I'm not user-familiar with their banking software, which I think was developed by Siebel. However, I am familiar as a customer who hears that my funds are on hold again quite a bit. Most deposits I make at Bank of America are automatically placed on hold for five to ten business days (mainly because I'm a new customer). No amount of me personally seeing the branch manager or verifying the funds seem to help. The tellers and customers service reps just look at me with doe eyes and say it's the computer's fault.
Since when did technology become the rule-maker? Over and over, businesses are taking important things like customer service and common business sense and making them subservient to technology. I don't think the IT people at Bank of America designed their implementation of the software with hurting customer service in mind. What they did do was listen to a bean-counter tell them that there have been too many losses over the years due to bad deposits and that can be controlled by the software.
There are other ways to keep bad deposits out of a branch. They include training people for one thing. Well-trained tellers can catch a lot of fraud or potentially bad deposits. I know this because I worked for a bank for six years, starting out as a teller. I caught fraudulent checks by looking at body language and applying our well-tested policies. What was unique about our bank was that tellers were given the power to override funds, make decisions about deposits, and use our best judgement. That bank was eventually became part of U.S. Bank. Now they are experts at counting beans and telling customers "no".
"It takes the money from the ATM or it pays to see a teller."
Yes, running a big business is hard. But when people who run big companies forget that they are there because other people pay them for goods and services, customers are nothing more than a dot in a spreadsheet. The companies of the future who can keep the human element alive when making technology and business decisions will crush their competition. I think a change is coming in banking which will drive that point home. Watch as the big banks can't squeeze anymore out of their cold calculations and cost cutting and then try to figure out why the smaller, local banks are eating away at their market share.
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