Diego Garcia entered an instructive description of an interaction with a bank on credit card matters that nicely illustrates a theme Ethics Alarms has been commenting on for quite a while. It is not exaggerated, because I have been enmeshed in dozens of these maddening experiences almost every month since my wife died last year. The practices are cruel, frustrating, time-consuming and hostile, and, I am convinced, often intentional. They are the product of multiple unethical conditions and practices, including incompetent management, needless technology complexity, sloth, poor hiring criteria, poor training, the public school system, lack of sufficient emphasis on English proficiency, corporate arrogance, outsourcing of jobs, inadequate staffing, and more. I also believe these systems and the factors creating them cause serious stress-related health problems among the public and even domestic and urban violence as well as mass shootings.
People have been conditioned to just shrug it all off as “how we live now.” We shouldn’t do that.
Here is Diego Garcia’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Bank of the Month: Merrick Bank”:
…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?
Ethics Alarms 
Jack, thanks a bunch for the COTD honor.
Phone support for customer service and tech support has been a special peeve of mine for years, probably due to my background in IT.
Every time I hear the phrase “Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed” — my response is ‘Liar liar, pants on fire’ because that company has been saying that for years and years and it’s never different.
I relate that to bumper stickers I see from time to time that say “Student driver”. I always wonder how many years they have had that bumper sticker on their car. I don’t know, maybe there are a lot of really crappy learners out there — that I am sharing the road with. That’s kind of scary. I guess the bumper sticker is intended to alert you that that car is being driven by someone who doesn’t know how to drive.
The other phone support message that really annoys me is “Due to heavy call volumes … “. Translation: Maybe we can keep you on hold long enough that you’ll give up.
But I actually trace this one back to Covid in 2020. I think companies latched onto Covid and all the online stuff we were forced into as a way of excusing substandard customer service. ‘High call volumes’ to me is a shorthand for ‘We don’t want to hire enough people to answer the help line’. And that has continued to this day.
Anyway, sub-rant over. Thanks again,
I still don’t use a smart phone and rarely carry my flip phone. I’ve mention that here before. It has nothing to do with tech-savvy; I’m a retired electrical / software engineer (dual Masters). If a smart phone is required I’ll do without; so, I guess I couldn’t live in the Washington DC area.
My biggest complaint with any technology pushed on the public is that the responsibility for errors always lands back on the consumer. If Spectrum, Verizon, United Health Care and any other auto payment charges you twice by “accident” it is your problem to resolve, not theirs. Before I retired, I heard a co-worker a few cubicals over from me yelling at Time Warner customer service trying to get his monthly payment back after they double charged him.
Luckily I carry a certain amount of cash with me at all times. Just a couple of months ago the credit card system was down in the Northeast or some large region. I stopped for gas and it said cash only with the notice the system was down. It was down for the better part of two days. My card was rejected in the grocery store once or twice because of a network issue; cash saved the day.
I also refuse to do negative option billing. Were they sign you up and automatically bill you until you cancel. I’ve never done negative option billing. There have been a few subscriptions and services I wanted but refuse to partake in negative option billing so I do without. Reluctantly, I do pay my utilities and health insurance with auto payments but technically, that’s not negative option billing.
It will be interesting to see what happens if the national network goes down and utility payments, insurance payments (health, car, etc) and other bills are missed. I’d bet each consumer will have to resolve their individual accounts and fight late fees and other penalties as the companies and services will not be sympathetic. Everything is set up to automatically function; when the shit hits the fan, you’re out of luck.
That’s my rant.
“I still don’t use a smart phone and rarely carry my flip phone.”
Exact same situation, here; I attribute it to being born without the “I NEED To Stay Connected!” gene.
PWS
My tech rant ….
shopping for my grandchildren (I have 12, plus 5 spouses), I found excellent choices from a vendor on Etsy. I’m processing my 6th order, when my CC company declines authorization whilst they verify my identity. No problem – a text code, a question answered, and I’m good to go. But this action triggers the security protocol on Etsy’s end, so they cancel 4 of my 6 pending orders, and lock my account.
The Chat feature is working well, except that their default FAQ and options assume that my account has been hacked. We’ve been communicating for two days now, and still not resolved. Time is ticking by, and I had hoped to have the same gifts for my adult grandchildren, on time, and for the cyber week pricing. We’ll see.
Not my first rodeo, but the first time I’ve been locked out of my account.
But it’s Christmas, so I’m keeping the faith and hoping for joy.
Grandma Lisa
This is all just one more example of a contagion from which certain industries (banks, cable, most utilities, many ubiquitous online services, insurance, airlines) suffer: They continually treat their customers like they are doing those customers a huge favor by deigning to lower themselves to doing business with you.
They largely get away with it because our society and culture (and in the case of insurance, the law) require you to buy these things so they know that there will always be a certain market share that they’ll hold because — you guessed it! — everybody does it, so for every customer they lose they probably pick one up from a competitor who lost one for similar reasons.
All we can do is be a combination of patient and assertive, because they will NOT change. They’ve been this way for DECADES.
–Dwayne