Chase just isn’t good at small details
It usually takes two to tango and with problems between Chase and its customers, this is often true. What I mean is that it is often the case that customers have done something the either exacerbated Chase stupidity, or created an opening in the first place. For instance, if everyone kept better track of their checking account balance, outrageous overdraft fees and predatory rearrangement of deposits and debits to maximize those fees wouldn’t be a problem.
But that ought to be irrelevant, because really truly good customer service would help you be a better person, not help you be a worse one. But making it easier for people to be late with payments, to miss payments, to borrow too much, to spend more than is in their checking account, that drives profits for Chase and other big banks.
Along those lines we find this story:
The crux of the problem with Chase is that I made a mistake in a payment in January, 2007. I paid the amount of $611.96 rather than the amount of $877.96 that was actually due.
This problem is that Chase did not notify me for 31 consecutive months that they were charging me a late fee of $23.51 for each and every month since 1/12/07 and that a total of $728.81 in late fees was due at that point. The amount has since grown to over $1,000.00.
This is so often the case with Chase, that they simply fail to notify customers of a critical detail that balloons into a bigger problem. A truly good bank would have gone out of their way to contact the customer, find out the reason for the incorrect payment, and try to resolve the problem. If it was simply a mistake and could be easily fixed, a good bank would make sure it got fixed. But to let a problem go 31 months without actually contacting the customer to try and figure out what is going on, is simply ridiculous.
Bad bad Chase | admin June 20, 2010
