Legal Commentary

Example of Really Bad Client Service

By Patrick J. Lamb

My colleague got married on January 2nd and changed her name from Lisa Castle to Lisa Carter (huge monogram savings).  Now as unique as Lisa is, you can imagine that there are a few Lisa Carters in the world.  Some of them have chosen to bank at Bank of America.  Unlike Lisa Carter of Valorem, one of the other Lisa Carters apparently had a judgment entered against her.  So you can imagine the surprise of Lisa Carter of Valorem when she checked her account balance at Bank of America and saw all zeroes.  Her accounts, both checking and savings, had been frozen in response to a judgment against an unrelated Lisa Carter who also happened to live in Chicago and maintain an account at B of A.  It took Valorem's Lisa Carter an entire week, countless unfruitful calls to B of A and intervention by one of her colleagues to get to the bottom of the situation.  Even after B of A acknowledged their mistake and restored her funds, they placed yet another unexplained freeze on her accounts thus depriving her of her funds for an additional twenty four hours.

It is hard to imagine a bigger screw up by B of A (ok, that subprime mortgage mess may have been bigger).  Even if you can, this is still a big screw up.  Failure to confirm addresses, social security numbers and other details that would allow them to distinguish the account of people with the same names.  Seem pretty fundamental to sound banking practices.  And yet  they screwed the pooch big time.

So what did Bank of America say to Lisa?  Did they give her a free toaster as they might if she opened a new account?  A week's worth of free checking?  An APOLOGY (gasp, the horror)?  Nope. Not a thing.  Notta.

Needless to say, Lisa's money is now earning interest in another financial institution.  I hope that B of A becomes aware of this post and experiences a moment of chagrin.  They won't, of course, but one can always hope.  In the area of customer service, at least with Bank of America, hope is all there is.

Full post as published by In Search of Perfect Client Service on May 21, 2010 (boomark / email).