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Comment by manishsharan | Hacker News Reader

I work for a large bank and can offer a tip. When you find yourself in this situation -- please create an incident report by lodging a complaint with the branch manager or online . Tweet if you must : your goal is to make sure that an incident shows up in the CRM. Branch managers bonus is tied to customer satisfaction parameters. This will not make you situation more bearable but it will force the branch to be more responsive in the future.

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No.

The correct answer is to close your account and move to a bank that actually has an interest in providing customer service. (Credit unions are great.)

I have zero interest in some company's CRM, how they apportion money to employees, or anything else of that sort. If a company cannot get meaningful feedback about customers' reaction to their service, well, that sounds like they have a serious business problem to solve, and expecting me to fix it for free is, frankly, insulting and doomed to failure[1].

My rule in life with this sort of thing is simple. Don't do business with assholes.

[1] Get back to me when WF's CEO's bonus depends on customers going out of their way to provide feedback.

This is the correct answer. Many times people feel trapped in their bank because it is a pain to move, but it’s not hard.

Throw me on the pile of people who don't love that tip. I'll go a step further and say, if that's the best remediation policy a large bank can offer, they're in a really bad spot.

As a consumer, I like my financial services to come in one of two flavors: Completely automated and self-service, or very personal.

Because I want to either never have to pick up the phone, or I want to know that, when I pick up the phone, ring straight through to a knowledgeable and empowered professional, instead of waiting on hold for 30m before getting some call center drone.

Any company where keeping a handle on customer service involves a signal having to filter through a CRM system and multiple layers of whatever-else-is-going-on-in-there is in neither of those camps: They aren't sufficiently automated and streamlined to give the hands-off experience, but they are also too bureaucratic to allow their customer-facing staff to offer a good hands-on experience.

And I just ain't got time for wallowing in some Goodhart's Law quagmire like that.

Don't direct people to bullshit bureaucratic snakeholes.

Even as someone who had abysmal interactions with mainstream banks when getting my mortgage, I don't think your response is charitable to the parent commentor, even if you don't think it's worth your time to provide feedback to a business entity, which is well within your rights.

If I as a dev for a large company see people online complaining about my product, I'd _probably_ tell them, in good faith, that if I had no direct touch to help, what channels they MIGHT be able to touch to have an impact, even if it's only post-factum.

What would you rather the business do? Have 0 receptivity to any channel of communication? Yeah, ticketing and support often sucks. But I see no reason to bite the hand that's trying to help you, both when they're going out of their way to try and give information that might move the needle, and when I'm hard pressed to give any more actionable advice. (at least for parallels within my space.)

I certainly would have liked to know I had _any_ recompense after BoA left me high and dry on some last minute mortgage detail and my agent went AWOL right before signing, even if it wasn't going to necessarily help my situation.

> as a dev

I've had a number of devs, when receiving feedback, tell me that I should instead seek out their bug tracker, register with their feedback system, open a support ticket, give detailed instructions about how to identify and fix my problem, and then wait for a decision about how I'm wrong.

I've done that maybe twice.

I have so many problems of my own that I have no time or interest to fix theirs. If they are blind to their problems they deserve what they get.

That's not my job.

Yes, but there are two issues here. One is getting your trouble resolved. Sadly that means doing some work you shouldn't have to at present. The other is sharing all those experiences so that we can garner momentum to change things.

Both problems can be resolved by moving your accounts to a credit union, and encouraging others to do the same.

I like credit unions, but I recently left one after they started adding various fees. CUs also often do not have the resources of a big bank. I have been stuck in Europe before waiting for the bank back home to open because they blocked my debit card even after I told them I was traveling. The contract 1800 number could not fix my issue.

IMO, the current best banking experience is Schwab. Hopefully they don’t make dumb changes and screw it up.

There is a theory that you should fix your own problems before you fix other's.

That's not a theory, that's a slogan.

And that's a straw man

You can do it concurrently.

Bingo

What I do, is just take my business somewhere else. Most people don’t review or give feedback, you just lose them and their word-of-mouth network forever. If it takes a bunch of extra steps to get your institution to do its job, I count myself lucky to have avoided deeper engagement to begin with. With any luck, enough people do this and your bank changes or dies.

I’m tired of businesses trying to get me to do their jobs for them.

Account closure doesn't register in manager KPIs?

Thanks for the tip.

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