Another New Record?

I sometimes regret that people don’t keep the same kinds of statistical records for business ventures that they do for sporting events and teams. It’s not that we don’t, really; but unless you have access to several proprietary databases and advanced statistical analysis software, the only way you can see any of them is to read about the Fortune 500, the Forbes 400, and so on. Even then, what we’re talking about is usually limited to things like gross income, net income, stock price, and a bunch of financial ratios that even the Economics students don’t really think of that highly. It would be much more entertaining if people actually kept statistics on the most hated company in America, for example, or the one with the worst customer service, the most worthless products, or the most heartless consumer policies. Although given some of the recent news items, it seems possible that Bank of America might be contending in more than one category…

According to a story in the Daily Mail online, a widow started receiving calls from Bank of America (B of A) collections people as often as 48 times each day, immediately following the death of her husband. She explained the situation to the Bank, and sent them copies of all of the documents as requested, but the collections calls kept coming, and when called on it, B of A had mysteriously “lost” all of the documentation, exactly the way they do in every news story where any legal action or billing situation has the possibility of charging more interest during a delay. Now, you and I have no way of knowing how much of this story is true – the Daily Mail is a tabloid, and not everything you read on line is going to be 100% correct anyway. What strikes me about this story is how easily you and I (and, to judge from the comments, thousands of other net citizens) accepted that it was true…

The fact is, there have been a lot of stories regarding this sort of atrocity staring Bank of America, and if only those cases where the Bank later confessed to the actions cited and promised to make things better are true, then B of A has some laughably bad public relations – and management in general. What seems to get overlooked in all of the consumer-advocate outrage and Internet reader glee is that even if all of these stories are absolutely true, they still represent only a tiny fraction of the company’s total customer interactions in any give year. Bank of America lays claim to literally tens of millions of customers, which means that for even one-tenth of one percent of its customers to have a horror story, there would have to be hundreds of thousands of such news items every year. Yet the actual number being reported appears to be more on the order of dozens, or perhaps hundreds…

The problem is, in the Internet age, anything you do wrong can be noted down and repeated by news organs and bloggers all over the globe, whereas anything you do right is likely to attract no attention at all. Bank of America could have perfect customer service 99.99999% of the time, and still be a complete failure dozens or hundreds of times each year –and thus wind up being humiliated in the press and excoriated online. The days in which a company could just cover all of its public relations disasters with several layers of customer service drones (none of whom can take responsibility for anything or accomplish anything, no matter how many times you ask) are gone; to survive in this strange new interconnected world, we are all going to have to try a little harder than that…

Although, at this rate, it seems as though B of A might also set a new record for how long it is taking them to figure all of this out…