I own and run several businesses, businesses that have actual customers, and know first hand that good customer service pays many dividends, some of which don’t come for years. Sometimes good customer service means giving the customer what they want even if they are technically wrong.
Well, Chase’s attitude towards customer service couldn’t be farther from this principle and their slash and burn tactics dealing with the sub-prime customers they helped create will come back to bite them, perhaps years down the road. Take for instance this customer.
I had a low rate balance transfer to a credit card. Most unfortunately, that company sold its card division to that den of thieves known as JPMorgan Chase. I was a couple weeks late just once — I was moving, all my records were in boxes, I thought I had paid the bill but didn’t. I paid it as soon as I discovered this, but oh no, they jacked up my rate sky high. The minimum payment went from about $200 to $600, almost all of which was just to service the interest. The customer service munchkins either said they couldn’t do anything about it, or just acted like I was some kind of a nut. I had to get help from my family, and then work like a slave to get out from under the thumb of those greedy loan sharks.
This is very typical Chase. The reality is that even good customers screw up sometimes, but rather than doing the right thing, Chase takes advantage of an opportunity like that to make more from their fee based banking. But what happens when you treat even your good customers in distasteful ways?
And now that I’ve paid them their pound of flesh, they’ve been sending me balance transfer offers. HAHAHAHAHA!
I got a house recently. Guess which company didn’t get my business? So they screwed me out of a few thousand dollars of interest, but lost the opportunity to get several times that much by servicing my mortgate. May they burn in *** for eternity. 
Exactly what I was thinking. You treat enough people badly and your growth rate somewhere down the line is bound to suffer.
One Chase customer writes about their experience going from a WaMu credit card to Chase:
Have any other former WaMu credit card holders who had their credit cards converted to Chase VISA Platinums and now within the past few days received notification that Chase has “upgraded” their card to Slate with BLUEPRINT?
If so, did the following also happen.
1.) Your APR markedly increase? (8.99% WaMu VISA to 14.99% Chase VISA Platinum to 17.24% (Chase) Slate)
2.) The schedule of fees go up? (too many increases to list, but the fees went up across the board)
3.) The grace period was reduced? (grace period went from 26 days w/ WaMu to 24 days on Chase VISA Platinum to 21 days on Slate)
Seems simple enough, you get a fixed rate auto loan from Chase and expect that over the life of the loan, the amount paid in interest will go down over time until the loan is paid off. Why then is this Chase customer seeing repeated increases in the amount of interest he is paying, even when he is increasing his principal payment?
Perhaps Chase snuck something sneaky into the fine print.
Chase is nothing if not creative. Their latest bit of creativity that is aimed at increasing fees is to say that a payment is due at the end of business hours on the due date rather than the actual end of the day. Furthermore the end of the business day is in their time zone (EST) not the one that you are in. With electronic payments these days, the end of business hours is not the end of the ability to make a payment, so business hours shouldn’t be important.
I suspect that some bean counter at Chase figured out that quite a few payments were technically on time according to their old rules but could be considered late if they just changed their rules a little bit.
With its overdraft fee income in jeopardy because of new Federal laws, is Chase starting to ding customers in other stupid ways? One customer writes:
I found there was a $3.00 charge against the account because I went over the maximum of four withdrawals within a given statement cycle. For this particular cycle I only did five due to added expenses that given month.
But they went and actually read Chase’s policy on their website.
Under federal regulations, you are allowed up to six pre-authorized withdrawals per monthly statement cycle
The customer contacted Chase by phone, in person, and by email and explained the situation but Chase refused to budge.
Perhaps next Chase will institute a fee for standing in line at their branches?
Is this a new way for Chase to get people to default on their loans?
Bobby changed his password for his Chase account for an auto loan and was subsequently unable to log in. Each time he try’s to log in it asks him for his credit card number. The problem is, he doesn’t have a credit card with Chase so is unable to provide a number. He has been trying to solve the problem for two months. He finally was able to make a payment:
I was able to call them and make a payment over the phone. The special fee charged to me associated with this highly unorthodox method of payment was only $14.00(US)
Yea, they charged him to make a payment by phone when he was unable to log into his account and they couldn’t solve the problem.
As reported here, we can only wonder why in the world would a Chase ATM show a positive balance when an account is overdrawn, unless you consider that Chase would happily give you money at an ATM so they can charge you an overdraft fee.
According to this very enlightening post on the Complaints Board, one way Chase is trying to circumvent the requirement in the Credit Card Reform Act of 2009 that automatic overdraft protection only be applied to accounts that specifically opt-in is to create a card that automatically enters the pin numbers instead of the customer doing it themselves, which technically circumvents the requirement that overdraft protection. They are enticing customers to use this new card by changing their rewards program so that it only applies to this new card type.
Apparently their letters to account holders trying to scare them into signing up for overdraft protection aren’t working well enough.
Bad bad Chase, Fees & charges | admin June 3, 2010 | 
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