"For your convenience"

Warning: Rant to follow. The point of the rant is why oh why oh why is it so difficult to do the simplest things? How is it that technology has become the bugbear of our lives? This post lays out a pesky customer service issue and the moral dilemmas therein.

I have two bank accounts in the U.S. I wanted to close one, which meant I had to reassign my automatic credit card payment from the account I want to close (Wells Fargo) to the one that will stay open (Citadel Credit Union). I went to the bill pay section of my credit card account (Bank of America) and entered the info for Citadel and selected it as the account of record. I did this on the first day of April. The joke was on me because I still have not succeeded.

I waited a few months because I know it can take a while. And I have better things to do than listen to: Press 1 to find out about our low interest loans, Press 2 for some other product you don’t want, Press 3 for ... you get the idea. Two weeks ago, I called Bank of America to find out why the payments were still coming out of Wells Fargo when Citadel was listed as the account to debit. “Even though you are on the Bill Pay Choice site, you originally set that up as electronic debit, so changing the account won’t work. And we don’t support Bill Pay Choice anymore, we have Bill Pay Online now.” I told her (nicely) her three different platforms were invisible and meaningless to me. While we were on the phone for a half hour, she deleted the Wells Fargo account and she was going to help me add Citadel. When I realised it would take a while for the Citadel account to be added, I realised my next credit card bill might not get paid. She did a manual payment out of Wells Fargo and told me to go online in the next few days to add Citadel.

I had to call Citadel to make sure I had the right routing and account number, then I added Citadel (again) to the Bank of America bill pay site. What happens next is Bank of America makes a small deposit and then a withdrawal to verify the account. They already did this in April, but I’m starting from scratch. I kept looking at Citadel for the little deposit/withdrawal, and nothing has happened. I call BofA today and they said they couldn’t verify my account. The woman said I could either download their verification form, fill it out and mail it to them, or set up my bill pay on Citadel’s site instead of on BofA’s site.

I chose the latter and called Citadel. I was on the phone for 48 minutes and spoke to five people today. I still don’t have a resolution. I tried setting up bill pay on Citadel on my own and found out the auto-filled section of Citadel’s bill pay site has a random address on it--a P.O. box in Thorndale, Pa. The website said, if your address is incorrect, to call your bank to have the address updated then start over. I called the bank and the first guy really didn’t know what to do. He sent me to account services, and the woman said I can change the address online myself. She humoured me, checked my address on Citadel’s system, and the address is correct. When I asked her how to fix the Thorndale address, she transferred me to Bill Pay. Bill pay tried to send me back to the bank but I persisted. Then I got someone else at bill pay who said the bank needs to fill out a subscriber change form and send it to bill pay. Then I got someone who put me on hold a lot and seemed to be trying to do something. She had me sign back into my account three times, but the Thorndale address persisted. I’m to try again tomorrow to see if the correct address is auto-filled on the Bill Pay page.

The kicker? I got a marketing e-mail today from Citadel: "Simplify Your Bill Time with Bill Payer.”

The moral issue here is, to be a good human, I must be patient with all the people I talk to. I’m not a patient person. I have expectations that things will be simpler and clearer than they ever are. It is not the fault of the people on the other end that I’ve been working on this simple problem for months. It is the fault of software programmers and website architects. And marketers who tell me how simple everything is when it is far far from simple. The woman who tried most to help me--the last woman I spoke with at Citadel--had an accent that I had difficulty understanding. I had to ask her to repeat herself multiple times, which I assume we both find humiliating. She asked me to confirm my name, my address, the last four digits of my social, and I was quick to tell her I had already done that several times. I hate myself for being curt with the "customer service" reps yet I feel so put out that I’m not getting the service I feel entitled to. And there’s the word, right? That’s the crux of the issue. What are any of us entitled to?

It takes such a force of will to be kind to people caught in the traps corporations set, with their outsourcing and corner cutting and unnavigable phone trees and glossy marketing. When I was at the maritime festival in Derry last weekend, I was at the info tent getting information about bands performing on two different stages. A woman came up next to me to ask about the dragon boat races. The info desk guy told her they were canceled. She said she had traveled to Derry just to see them, then she said--with a beautiful smile and a face beaming benevolence and good cheer--“Ach, sure these things happen.” She didn’t seem the least bit put out.

Her. I want to be her.
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