Not feeling smurfy this morning, but I have to get a few issues covered with dispatch. First up….
The Merrick Bank is incompetent. (Just my informed opinion, now! Don’t sue me!) For reasons irrelevant to this post, I recently acquired a Merrick Bank credit card, and now have my first bill to pay. After an absurdly involved registration process (including a glitch in the programming that I already registered a complaint about—the website registration asks for a first and a last name, but not a middle initial or a suffix. However, the application for the card DOES include spaces for middle initials and suffixes. So to register to use the “convenient website” to manage one’s account, entering what is asked for, first and last names, results in an error message.
After 25 minutes of fighting with the automated Merrick phone zombie, I finally reached a human being who explained that I was supposed to include my middle initial in the “First Name” space and the “Jr” suffix where it asked for my last name. “Oh. And how was I supposed to know that?” I asked. “I can understand your frustration, sir…” Yeah, bite me. FIX IT, assholes.
After deciphering the stupid system (which included deciding on three secret questions) I got to my current charges page. It stated that I owed $645.60 and asked if I wanted to pay “entire amount owed.” However, there seemed to be no way to learn what the charges were that totaled up to that amount. All I could get was the record of $67.00 in charges.
Again I went through automated phone zombie hell and eventually asked of the human representative who appeared after my being on hold for ten minutes the simple question, “I want to pay the entire amount owed. How do I discover on your ‘convenient’ website what those charges are? What’s the secret link?”
First, the guy had a virtually impenetrable accent. He spoke like Balki Bartokomous (Bronson Pinchot) from “Perfect Strangers” trying to do an impression of Bill Dana’s José Jiménez character imitating Curly Howard in the Three Stooges’ Maharaja routine. Repeatedly I asked him to slow down and speak clearly, which he couldn’t do. On top of this, he couldn’t give me a straight answer to my question. Finally I gave up and ask to speak to Balki’s supervisor.
After another ten minute wait, she came on the line, a woman who had a thick Spanish accent and who talked too fast, but was at least minimally comprehensible. She told me that I can’t see the charges that add up to $645.60 because those additional charges will only be reflected in the next statement scheduled to be posted on December 18. Oh! So why, exactly, does your stupid bank tell me I owe an amount and invite me to pay it without having any means for me to know what I’m paying for? Or include on the website the explanation you just gave me?
I registered thorough complaints, orally and in writing, regarding the bank’s hiring and training practices that resulted in a Turkish-Spanish Gabby Johnson handling customer service, a user-hostile website and idiotic billing practices….for all the good that will do. Remember this post?
As soon as I get that December statement and pay it, I’ll be cancelling my Merrick Bank credit card. And I urge you all to look elsewhere for banking services. Or in the words of King Arthur…
Ethics Alarms 
Bank of America has a pretty good website for its credit cards. Every other bank is extremely frustrating because I am so used to the relatively good design at BoA. BoA shows posted transactions, pending transactions, and a running balance for each sequential transaction so you can easily tell what is owed or will soon be owed at each step of the way. Almost every other credit card website lacks at least one of those three, making it that much harder to figure things out. I’ve had the card for so long, however, that I have no memory of the registration process.
I mainly bank with BoA as well and can independently confirm what Rich writes.
In addition, I have a card with Chase (the Amazon card) and their site has all of these same features, albeit in a different layout and UI flow (which should come as no surprise).
Jack, you should be aware that closing a credit card account yourself can negatively affect your credit. Best practice is to simply never ever use it until the bank closes the account on their own for inactivity after a couple of years. (Of course, if there are annual and/or monthly fees, that changes the calculus.)
Plus, carrying their card for a couple of years and forcing them to print and mail all those empty statements to you, all the while never making any money from the transaction fees, is an effective way to passively-aggressively stick it to them.
–Dwayne
Forgot to add: If you do decide to either close or abandon this card and apply for another from a different bank, best to do it ASAP. Applying for credit is itself a small negative on your credit rating, so doing more than one all at the same time (ideally in the same month) is another best practice to mitigate the effect.
–Dwayne
Hmm, my Chase Amazon card is one of the websites that frustrates me for being inferior to BoA. It lacks the running total after each transaction.
I’ve had zero problems and a GREAT experience with my Discover CC; their customer service (IMO) is second to none.
Matter-a-fact, just the other day they immediately alerted me to a suspicious charge. I cancelled and got my new card with three (3) days.
PWS
My wife uses a Discover card and would heartily second what you wrote. Discover has been VERY good in our experience.
I’ll also say DC has been great; my one beef with the company’s technology stack is up until a couple months ago, only the first eight characters of a password were checked.
you could simply stop at eight or type garbage after that and the system would let you in.
Now they appear to have outsourced authentication to Okta, which is a different ball of wax, but plausibly better than their legacy system.
That is interesting., and it sounds like a good feature. I do have a recent BoA experience regarding account setups.
My sister has had a BoA credit card for something like 50 (!) years. She is very much not tech savvy, and is someone who always wants paper statements mailed to her.
On this card, she had made arrangements for her payment to be automatically drafted each month — the payment would be $150 or the statement balance, whichever was smaller. She had made this arrangement by phone as she never had set up an online account for this card. Well, a couple months ago they wrote her to say that they were cancelling this automatic payment and she would have to go online to set it back up.
So naturally she turned to me for help. I thought, well, this should be simple, because of course setting up an online account these days is simple. Au contraire.
As it happened, she had a second BoA credit card for which I am an authorized user, and naturally I had set up an online access for that card. She had what we thought was the login information for BoA, but it kept asking us to verify a card we didn’t recognize. Eventually we thought of the other card but, alas, by then the BoA system was hopelessly confused.
I kid you not — we would go to log in, it would ask us to verify something on the card, then sent us a code via text message, and then it would return to the screen where we would verify something on the card. It was in an infinite loop.
OK, time for tech support. I looked up and down their website — there was no ‘chat’ offered. Ok, time for a phone call. I can guarantee there is no phone tree on the planet that would be able to figure out this problem. Fine, after some verbal tussling and a few back and forths, we persuaded the phone tree to transfer us to a person. Actually didn’t spend too long on hold, then my sister identified herself and said her brother was also on the line and could they talk to him.
I was able to describe the problem, and the agent was actually able to reset the account quickly. So far so good. While she was still on the phone, we were able to log in and the account for the second credit card came up. OK, piece of cake from here. My sister wanted the agent to stay on the line, but I told her of course it would be trivial to add another credit card.
20 or 30 minutes later, after scouring the website and exploring all the different options and pages I could find — well there wasn’t any way to add a second credit card.
Back to the phones. Again, hopeless to even explore the phone tree for this little problem, so we wrestled it into submission once again and managed to get to a representative. After talking with the agent, she remoted in to my sister’s computer. Using the mouse she pointed at a place on the screen and said right there is where you add a new account. Except there was nothing there. She allowed as she had never seen such a thing, so she put us on hold while she communed with the tech gods.
So while we were sitting there, she hacked our account (or something) and lo! When we refreshed the screen there was the link to add another account. I confess that, under the circumstances, I asked the agent to stay on the line while I added the second card and verified it was there. After she hung up, I was able to setup an automatic payment. Not totally sure it will do what she had before, but we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
==========
That’s a very long, frustrating story. It came about because someone at BoA decided that it was intolerable to have payment arrangements that were not made via an online account, whether you wanted one or not. They offered no alternative.
Jack has commented on this trend before — companies increasingly are requiring customers to be tech savvy to use their services. But forcing 80 or 90 year-olds to master technology that didn’t exist until they were grandparents is, I think, not ethical and not smart. Those people who don’t want smart phones will gradually die off. Why make their lives miserable in the mean time?
How odd (and incompetent). I don’t think I’ve seen any bank card or similar website that doesn’t show at least something like “activity since last statement” or equivalent.