That Just Leaves Taxes…

On today’s edition of “Race to the Bottom” we explore another new low in the field of customer service achievements, with the case of a company for whom death isn’t enough to get out of paying your service fees. In fact, according to the story as presented by the local television news, death, two death certificates, a written request and statements by the executor of the estate and the beneficiary of the will were not enough to get out of paying your account maintenance fees. Which would probably be a little easier to understand if the bank account in question had more than just $40 in it to begin with…

In what I have to consider a truly exceptional example of bureaucracy run amok, a woman in Virginia who was trying to close her late mother-in-law’s checking account at Bank of America had to produce a death certificate for her mother-in-law, then that of her father-in-law who had passed away 15 years earlier; she was also required to bring in the executor of the estate to confirm the situation. After all of that, the company still refused to close the account and issued a bill for another “account maintenance fee,” then claimed to have never seen any of the relevant paperwork and demanded it be faxed to them…

It wasn’t until the local television station I linked above got the story and started telling everyone in their broadcast area (and everyone in the world over the Internet) that the company finally promised to resolve the matter and repay the account fees it had been charging. If that sounds to you like a case of closing the barn door after the horse has already run off, you’re not alone in that…

Now, clearly there was no one at B of A rubbing their hands together and cackling with glee at the prospect of raking in $40 dollars of extra profits from this account; it’s just a case of the company screwing up a routine function somewhere in their infrastructure and failing to complete the operation as they were supposed to. Given that they process thousands (if not millions) of similar account changes each day, it’s not that shocking that the occasional one falls through the cracks, or that the company is not particularly concerned by it. What is remarkable about this situation is the amount of money involved versus how much this foul-up is likely to cost…

If B of A charges just $7 a month for small checking accounts (and they often charge more than that), then the loss of a single account for six months (or six accounts for one month) will cost them more than they could have made on this situation if they had been in the right in the first place. They had no prospect of getting more money from the customer (since she’s dead) or from her estate, and the very real chance of alienating the family and anyone else who saw this story online, but this risk wasn’t enough to warrant making any special effort to resolve the situation before it go spread all over the world…

The truth is, the amount involved really isn’t enough to inspire the company to any special effort, and losing $7 (or even $40) will not ever draw the company’s attention. But if a few million people see this story (which they have), and even one percent of them decide not to do business with B of A as a consequence (which they might), then this could easily go from losing $7 to losing $140,000 per month – rather a lot for failing to fix what was probably just a clerical or routing error…