My Bank of America Story

I recently had some interaction with Bank Of America that got my blood pressure up. Due to an admitted error on my part, two transactions hit my checking account over the weekend causing my balance to dip below zero by approximately $15. This resulted in $70 in overdraft fees. The lack of funds in my account is my fault, an oversight for which I take full responsibility. However, to charge me $70 for such an error seemed a bit egregious and I took issue with it.

This is not the first time I've taken issue with Bank Of America policies or their application of them, and that's why this situation really got my blood boiling. There's more to this story than just a knucklehead (that's me) with too many accounts that forgot to transfer money to the right one. This is about customer service, and it's something that I, as a consumer, take pretty seriously. So let me fill you in.

My very first checking account was opened in 1996 with Bank Of America (BofA) in California. For thirteen years I've had that same account, and I still do (for now). When I moved to Texas, I quickly discovered that BofA in California does not play well with the rest of the country. I could still use my ATM card to make purchases and withdraw money, but deposits now required a visit inside the branch to see a teller. Most of my life is paperless now, but since my wife and I are still fortunate to have birthdays, we do occasionally have a need to deposit checks. To make our lives more convenient, we opened a new checking account at BofA in the great state of Texas.

Let's pause for a moment, because I'd like to start keeping score. Every time I am inconvenienced by BofA, they will lose a point. When they provide positive customer service, they will gain a point. Here's the first example. While it might appear they did a noble thing by making life more convenient for us so we don't have to go inside the bank every time we make a deposit, the whole reason it became necessary was because they were no longer providing a service we once had. That's minus one for the bank.

Running Score: -1

This arrangement worked out just fine for awhile. For the most part we let the California BofA account just sit while we used the new Texas account. There was one instance I can remember when I decided to buy a song on iTunes for $.99 and forgot that the billing was still tied to my California BofA account. After taxes, the account became a few cents negative and I was assessed a $35 overdraft fee. Realizing the absurdity, they promptly returned the fee, but they lose another point for the fact that I was inconvenienced and had to call them to resolve the silly issue.

Running Score: -2

After our daughter was born, people started to give us money on her behalf. My wife, ever the doting mommy, thought it prudent to open a savings account for our little princess. She walked into the bank one day and set it all up, proudly announcing to me that it was all free. We mostly ignored the account until several months later, when we noticed the savings account was overdrawn. For several months, BofA had been charging us a hefty maintenance fee of about $15 on the account because the balance was below a threshold we were never told about. Eventually the account went negative and the overdraft fees started piling up. So did my anger.

Let's assess the damage: Minus one for lying to us in the branch. Minus one for even having a policy that includes charging for a savings account (that's just silly). Minus one for not contacting us directly when the account went negative.

Running Score: -5

My wife and I fought over who was going to make the call. She won. After a heated discussion with the customer angering agent, we ended up with the overdraft fees reversed. They kept all the other money they robbed from my daughter. The account was immediately closed. The entire transaction was brutal, and my wife had to fight to even get the overdraft fees back, so the bank earns no points here for that "gesture", and they lose another point for keeping the other fees.

Running Score: -6

When I found out they had essentially drained what little money had been in our daughter's account, I was furious. Bank of America had just purchased Countrywide who happened to be our home mortgage lender. I had been thinking about refinancing our home loan and after the savings account debacle, I was ready to march into the branch the next day, close my remaining accounts and threaten to take my mortgage to another company regardless of the rate.

Let me be clear about why I was upset. I believe a company can and should charge whatever they want for their services. At issue here is the fact that we were not sufficiently informed about those charges and when we, in good faith, brought this to their attention, we were essentially accused of lying. Why else would a company, when faced with the loss of business, refuse to budge in an arbitrary disagreement with a customer?

I suspect companies that operate this way assume that most consumers are probably not vindictive to the point they are willing to endure the costs and hardship associated with taking their business elsewhere. In truth, this is what ultimately happened to me with the savings account debacle. I was overcome by more important life events and let the issue drop. But I did not forget.

Yesterday that bad taste in my mouth came back when I got hit with those overdraft fees from our big $15 weekend on the town. Adding insult to injury, if I still had a savings account the money could have instantly been transferred to cover the deficit, thus saving me an unnecessary headache. Minus one.

Running Score: -7

This story gets worse before it gets better. When I noticed on Wednesday that my pending transactions were going to put me in the red, I immediately transferred $100 into the account. That should have put the account around a positive $85. Thursday, I logged in to verify my transfer. The balance: $10. My running total never showed the account going negative, but it did show two $35 overdraft fees. How could I incur overdraft fees if the account never balanced out officially to zero? I called the customer angering number and made the inquiry.

My mother always told me you catch more bees with honey, so whenever I am involved in a customer service confrontation I try to start out as calm and polite as possible. I did that here...at first.

The customer angering agent on the phone told me that regardless of the "pending" status, my "available balance history" showed two transactions against an account with insufficient funds, thus the two $35 overdraft fees. One of the transactions was literally three dollars and fifty cents.

"Thirty-five dollars for a three dollar charge that hadn't even been processed yet?" I asked incredulously.

She replied: "Yeah, it's a lot, isn't it?"

Of all the things she could have said to me in response, that was the wrong choice. Minus one for being unprofessional. Her apparent lack of awareness at how unprofessional the response was left me wondering why I was still doing business with this company. The bees took cover as my pleasant honey-like demeanor immediately took on the pungent odor of vinegar. With steam coming out of my ears, I told the customer angering agent that my relationship with the bank did not have much of a future. She then had the audacity to ask me if there was anything else she could help me with. I guess she was hanging her hat on raising my blood pressure.

Minus one for pissing me off.

Running Score: -9

After I hung up I replayed the conversation in my head and I started to boil. The overdraft started a fire that, admittedly, I contributed to by playing with matches. But now "customer service" had just fanned the flames. I started to reflect on the savings account debacle. Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice and it's time to find a new bank. I decided I would be making a stop at the branch on my way home and I posted my intention on Twitter.

I pause here briefly to explain something about Twitter that you may not be aware of. Many companies, in an effort to leverage social networking to their advantage, have started using Twitter as a customer service tool. They run searches of Twitter posts looking for their company name and when they find people like me (read: irate customers) they reach out to try and mitigate the issue "proactively". This morning, I noticed I have a new follower, David Knapp, alias BofA_help. Putting the bank on the board, plus one for not having their heads completely where the sun doesn't shine. David, pay attention, this next part is for you.

Running Score: -8

By the time I reached the bank I was seething. I had about four paragraphs of rage ready to go in my head. I didn't even care about the money anymore, this was about thirteen years of patronage being disregarded over a very insignificant amount of money considering my various mortgage, checking, and credit accounts with the BofA machine. They own most of my house but they feel the need to stick it to me for a $15 oversight? Those were the thoughts going through my head when I walked into the branch.

I was immediately greeted by two women asking how they could help me. One of them led me to her office and I managed to get through the first paragraph and a half with most of the bees still buzzing about. Paragraph three is where the message was going to get sour, but I never got to it. This customer service experience was positive, which will earn the bank another point and here's why:

• She offered solutions to help prevent the situation in the future.
• She recognized the absurdity of the situation and refunded the fees.
• She was gracious, thanked me for coming in, and didn't act like my business was a burden.

I left fairly calm, with my money back in my account, and feeling like the bank and I were at least on speaking terms again. We'll see if we end up being friends (that refinance thing is still pending, with the potential of becoming another debacle). Hopefully there is a lesson here for David and the BofA customer service team. They've ended this inning down by seven, and frankly it should be more.

Running Score: -7

Everything that occurred was at the convenience of the bank, not the customer. At the top of my bank statement reads the message:

"Customer since 1996. Bank of America appreciates your business and we enjoy serving you."

I find this ironic because, in the situations I've described, the bank did nothing to serve me. I had to call them. I had to drive to the branch. After thirteen years, why don't they know me better? Why don't they remember that time when a $.99 iTunes download caused a similar overdraft incident? Can't they see that between then and now the only thing that's happened is I've made every payment to every creditor including them on time? Or do they know all that and just don't care? Are they assuming I won't expend the effort to change banks?

Here's a hint: I expended the effort to drive to the branch with the intention of closing my account. In the past two years I've ditched my telephone and television provider, mostly for poor customer service. Don't test me.

Banking technology has come a long way over the years. The twenty-first century allows us to transfer money anywhere in the world over the web, deposit checks without an envelope, and use a cell phone to check an account balance. Customer service however is still in the dark ages. It's time to step it up guys. If you're reading about a problem on Twitter, you're already too late.

What is RSS?

I'm glad you asked, because RSS, or "Really Simple Syndication", is helping me deliver content to you better, whether it's a story about my latest trip at The Road Scholars or my new musings on technology on the Sean Genovese Blog. Until recently, if you wanted to find out if there was anything new to read on one of my blogs, you had to either visit the site on the web and look, or sign up for The Road Scholars mailing list and wait for my email. Now you can bring new content that you want to read directly to you via RSS. This is great news if you

• Don't like to have your inbox flooded with email
• Change email addresses frequently
• Can't access certain sites or email clients at work
• Don't want to be bothered checking dozens of web sites for information you care about
• Love reading TRS updates as quickly as they are written

Check out this brief video for more information on how RSS works.

If you are a Road Scholars fan, here's how RSS can work for you. There are currently three blogs I publish:

• The Road Scholars
• Speed Bump Chronicles
• Sean Genovese Blog

There is actually a fourth one called TRS News. This is what gets published at the main Road Scholars homepage and what you see if you are subscribed to the TRS mailing list. Whenever I post something new to one of the blogs, I simulcast a snippet on TRS News.

Each of the four blogs also has it's own RSS feed, so by using an RSS reader, you can subscribe to all of the feeds, or only the ones that interest you (so if you like everything listed above, I suggest the TRS News feed since it is the most comprehensive).

Here are the RSS feed links to the four blogs mentioned above:

• TRS News
• The Road Scholars
• Speed Bump Chronicles
• Sean Genovese Blog

If you already use RSS, none of this is news to you and all I've done here is provide you with a one stop shop for all the TRS feeds you may be interested in. If you're not using RSS, I hope you'll check it out. It's not just for The Road Scholars, you can also subscribe to your favorite sports scores, weather reports, news headlines...anything that has a feed!

My Tivolution: Three Sheets (on FLN)

If you aren't a fan of Zane Lamprey, you should be. His show, Three Sheets, originally was produced and aired on Mojo, an all HD television network that is now defunct. After a hiatus that lasted way too long, Zane has resurfaced with Three Sheets on the Fine Living Network. The show follows Lamprey around the world exploring different drinking customs. As he says in the intro:

Every night, in every city around the world, it happens. People pour into local watering holes to well, drink. It's my mission...to traverse the globe getting to know these different people and their drinking customs; bellying up to the bar and with any luck, making some new friends.

Check out this video from CNN, by a less than enthusiastic reporter, to get a feel for Zane's flavor.

It's a good show.

Atlantis Makes Refuelling Stop in San Antonio

Those of you following my tweets today know that I saw space shuttle Atlantis take off from Lackland Air Force Base after a two hour refuelling stop on its ferry flight back to Kennedy Space Center.  

My boss captured some awesome photos of the departure.

We call this the "money shot".

For more photos and information about Atlantis and its last mission, check out Damaris' "How I Am Becoming An Astronaut" blog.

Innovation In The News: Advice For Natali DelConte

I recently read a blog by Natali DelConte, a senior editor for CNET, about the role technology plays in the news.  Natali is working on a new format for a general news webcast and she is struggling--overwhelmed was actually the word she used--with how to make a news broadcast interactive without bombarding the viewer with gratuitous uses of technology that amount to little more than gimmicks.  Discussing the differences of "old media" versus "new media", she poses the following question: 

"Has the information evolved just because I can live stream myself blow drying my hair? Is social media a gimmick that gives the viewer the illusion of interaction with the news?" 

Her concerns are well-founded; we've certainly seen plenty of gimmicks in television news lately, perhaps most notably during last year's election coverage.  Saturday Night Live had a field day with anchors and their dreadful attempts to incorporate some cool new tech--interactive touch screen technology--into broadcasts.  

For the most part, the anchors skillfully demonstrated how out-of-their-league they were with the new technology, thus the technology was reduced to little more than a gimmick.  It wasn't the technology that failed them though, it was their sacrifice of the process for a result.  Rather than focus on how technology could enhance the delivery and timeliness of good information to draw in ratings, they tried to bring in the ratings with flash and glitz.  This was technology for technology's sake and it completely bypassed an important and often lost step in the process of improvement: innovation.  

As an Industrial Engineer and a lean practitioner, my biggest challenge is how to effect not just change, but innovative change. In business, change usually means better quality, lower cost, and improved schedule performance. Organizations are always falling into the trap of focusing on lowering cost and improving schedule and quality and they fall short and can't figure out why.  They skip the innovation, ignore the process, and instead focus on the desired result. Here's an example. 

Consider the attempt by so many corporations in America to replicate the success of the Toyota Production System.  In the mid 1900's, Taiichi Ohno developed the Toyota Production System as a disciplined way of improving manufacturing processes through the systematic elimination of waste.  Companies all over the world, including our own now defunct American car companies, benchmarked Toyota in an effort to replicate their success.  They failed.  Why?  Because rather than change behavior and truly innovate, they went after the result, not the process.  They went to Toyota factories and saw moving assembly lines and kitted parts and they duplicated what they saw as if pulling the techniques off the shelf at a supermarket.  What they failed to see is the theory behind the practice.  The process of eliminating waste, a pinnacle of the Toyota Production System, was sacrificed for the desired result, a buzzing production line. Nevermind that cost, quality, and schedule were not improved.  What better illustration than today's bankruptcy announcement by GM.  Last time I checked, Toyota is still in business.

Innovation, on the other hand, is an investment in the process, not the result.  Nobody wants a shiny car that won't perform well on the road or requires a ton of maintenance.  Likewise, nobody wants information delivered in a fancy "new media" way if it's stale or irrelevant.  Sometimes it's necessary to ignore the result you want and simply focus on the process.  That's when true innovation takes place.  Americans don't "buy American" for the sake of buying American.  They buy American because they want American to by synonymous with "better".  They want to be proud of something that says "American".  When you focus on the result--buying American--and you ignore the process--make it better--innovation is lost and you simply have a shiny car that doesn't run well and nobody wants.  But I really am not writing this to beat up on the car companies--they just happened to provide a very timely, very effective example. 

Let's try another one, something a bit more personal.  I recently attended an industry conference in California.  Consider the desired result if you are a conference organizer: engaged attendees. What good is a conference if nobody attends or those that attend don't pay attention?  As an organizer, you can either focus on the result or the process. 

Here's the result-oriented approach:

• You tell your keynote speakers you want an engaged audience.  
• You equate participation with engagement and you ask the speakers to incorporate questions and answers into their presentation. 
• The speakers focus on periodically cold-calling questions to various attendees to stimulate "participation".  
• The attendees are bored with the presentation (since no emphasis was placed on the quality of the content), fearful of being put on the spot, and maybe even a little resentful for being talked down to as if they were back in school.
  

Here's what the organizers at this particular conference actually did (a process-oriented approach):

• They told the keynote speakers they were incorporating an audience response system into their presentations.  
• Each attendee was given a credit card-sized RF "clicker" they could use to provide instant feedback to specific questions. Results were fed directly into the speaker's presentation slides. 
• Rather than focusing on the audience, the speakers focused on the content of their presentations and the audience feedback they would solicit about the presentation. 
• The result? Measurably engaged conference attendees willingly participating in every keynote presentation. Gratuitous use of technology or innovation?
  

So here's my advice for Natali, and anyone else who wants to effect change in whatever it is they do: 

1. Don't fear gimmicks; innovation is inherently risky and gratuitous technology, or any number of other tools or "gimmicks", can help if used properly.  As Henry Petroski says in The Evolution of Useful Things, "Our expectations for a technology rise with its advancement".  It can't advance if you don't use it.
   
2. Innovation isn't always successful--at first.  As a change agent, you don't always know where you are going when you start the journey.  Don't be afraid to take a risk on something that might not pan out.  A negative result is still a result--and a good one--provided you stay focused on the process. The desired result more often than not will naturally follow.
   
3. GM and Chrysler have demonstrated to the world that pouring money at a problem doesn't work if you're not willing to try something different.  Don't be afraid of change, innovation demands it.
   

Personally, I hope Natali incorporates every bit of new technology into the show that she can get her hands on.  Twitter, You Tube, Microsoft Surface--who cares if it seems gratuitous and trite (besides, if anyone can make blow drying hair exciting, she can) as long as she's still delivering good information people want.  If she does, a year from now other shows will be scrambling to incorporate {insert the great result here} and scratching their heads trying to figure out why they didn't think of it.  

Chances are they were too busy focusing on the result and totally forgot about the fundamental purpose of any good news organization: the process of delivering information.

Obama Man by Greg Morton (Bob & Tom TV)

My Tivolution: Cash Cab

If you haven't already, set your favorite DVR (or tune in live if you absolutely must) to the Discovery Channel game show Cash Cab.  Hosted by comedian Ben Bailey, the show takes place inside a New York City taxi cab.  There are a couple of reasons I love the show.  

First, the technology required to overcome the logistical challenges of recording a game show live in a moving vehicle fascinates me.  As a former student of video production, I would jump at the opportunity to witness the show live from "behind the scenes".  Some of the secrets are revealed on the show's web site here.

Second, unlike any other game show I can think of, Cash Cab contestants don't have an agenda i.e., they aren't trying to get on a game show.  Statistically speaking, the show's concept seems to be a great way to get a random sampling of "the average Joe" contestant.  

Finally, Cash Cab contestants are constantly impressing me with their mastery of "general knowledge". The mainstream media tends to make me think we live in a nation of dunderheads, but watching regular people answer questions about current events, history, technology, etc.--and get them right--makes me feel a little better about how smart the American people really are.

So what's next, Discovery? Money Train on the subway? Cash Car in LA? Give me a call, I'll help you find the next concept. And if you need a host, I could make myself available.