Banks are not in the business of giving you services. Banks are in the business of selling you money. And they like charging as much as possible for the money they sell you.
Sure, but my local hardware store is also trying to sell me stuff and is trying to charge as much as possible for it, yet I don’t have to jump through opaque and frustrating procedures and barely functional web systems to buy a 2x4.
The author’s issue comes down to banks being apparently uninterested in attracting business by solving actual customer pain points. Instead of solving real problems (terrible UX around a lack of statements, a malicious USB stick can drain your bank account, etc) the banks mostly just appear to trend chase (chat app! Crypto!).
The bar to open a hardware store next door is much lower than the bar to open a bank (I am not arguing for more bank deregulation). And the bar for the customer to switch from one hardware store to another is much lower than the bar for a customer to move all their accounts, direct deposit, mortgage, etc. from one bank to another.
Never had these problems with my CU (LMCU), and honestly Cap1 bank has been doing a pretty bang up job with my CC's. I'm considering trying them for banking.
Capital One CC and Capital One Bank (360) are completely different creatures, with a shared web interface. I've accumulated a bunch of experience with the major online banks, for my personal use as well as settling an estate. My "main account" is at Ally, but due to the possibilities of account lockout I still have accounts at all three in addition to a local CU (for cash withdrawals, notary/medallion stamps).
Discover customer service is fantastic, with friendly interactive humans. I feel bad that Discover is not my main bank - I was going that way until a binding arbitration clause (with unreasonably short opt-out period) derailed the relationship. Ally is adequate, with the "standard" humans emulating robots relying on a case system. They will promise to call/email you back but never will, so you have to poll. Capital One 360 is at or below Ally - I had a poor experience with them settling an IRA, but they're ending their IRA business so who knows.
Unfortunately the Discover web / app is the worst of the three (although they support OFX Direct Connect last time I checked). Ally and Cap1 are nice (although there are some things you cannot do through the Cap1 web interface until you find a hidden link to the old web interface, which is still partially active). One standout feature of Cap1 is that you can open a reasonable line of credit for overdraft protection, if you don't generally have enough cash sitting around in an adjacent savings account.
P.S. I tried Alliant CU but was not impressed by their web interface or the hoops required to login to the app. Customer service seemed okay. Maybe in a different life.
P.P.S. Ally Invest is a completely separate creature from Ally Bank. I've had two different horrendous experiences with Ally Invest, and urge everyone to steer clear. The reps sound like they know what they're talking about (holdovers from TradeKing I presume), but are completely disconnected from the back office's procedures or activities.
honestly Cap1 bank has been doing a pretty bang up job with my CC's
What a coincidence.
Last month, my wife called Cap1 to close two department store credit card accounts she hasn't used in years.
This morning, I'm doing the bills and in the letters are two from Cap1 welcoming her to her new department store credit cards, here are all the terms and rates, and here's your first bill for $0. Happy spending!
I too was satisfied with my Cap1 cc account(s), tried their banking, and it was a total disaster. I eventually got my money out (through two systems that had been deprecated and closed down, with no apparen't notice to me), and left $10 in one account that still has paper statements - but no ability to sign in to the account any more.
and honestly Cap1 bank has been doing a pretty bang up job with my CC's
As I said, the banks just love to sell you money at a very nice profit. What is the interest rate on those CCs? Is it anywhere near the current 'zero interest rate'?
It's so eldritch. I've found dealing with the healthcare system is similar. Any business that you need more than they need you, this happens. There really should be consumer protections about this but I have no idea how that would even be implemented.
I recently needed to make several medical appointments with a large healthcare provider. They had FOUR different online portals to "manage" my appointments and information. Navigating that was the exact same experience as the article, just without an actual person.
It's beyond tech and fin stuff IMO. The drive for profit has just driven customer service through the floor across pretty much every industry. If I think about all the services I use - banks, energy, SAAS, trains, internet... I don't think any one of them would provide me with a customer service email or phone number that would end me up in a conversation with a real, intelligent, English speaking, non-cribsheet following human being. Every single one would give me a chat bot, a generic email form, a number to ring that I'd have to sit on for a long time and an end result that was far from what I'd consider good, considerate customer service.
Strikes me that there is potential here for businesses to genuinely make customer service their focus, at the expense of profit or maybe by offering their services at a slightly higher premium. The Groundhog Day cycle of doom that we all feel all the time is deeply damaging to everyone concerned apart from shareholders. It'd be a breath of fresh air if companies went back to focusing on their customers first and foremost.
My experiences with Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, and Vanguard have all had that level of service, including talking to a human immediately the few times I’ve needed to.
Note that they’re all primarily investment brokers that sometimes offer banking like services.
I foresee a future where those that can afford it pay a virtual assistant (read outsourced secretary) to do this stuff for them. And as always, poor people are fucked.
I know this is the kind of flattering in-group humor aimed at people like me, but I still found it hilarious.
Also, considering that I'm listening to a talk about the computational complexity of economic planning on the side, the "we should recreate the entire financial system from first principles" part felt like a rude yet completely deserved callout.
Fwiw, I don't think economic planning is or was the main problem of socialism, more the information gathering that precedes it or the mechanism design that comes after, but I have a soft spot in my heart for anyone engaging productively with alternatives to capitalism, even if they aren't particularly fleshed out.
Hilarious. Some things haven’t really changed in 40+ years I’ve been dealing with banks. Looking forward to a “short conversation with YouTube about my account” version.
To prevent Google from tracking purchases. Google scans all email that passes through its servers and parses out who bought what. If the information isn't in the email, it makes it harder for Google to do this. Presumably Amazon wants to keep this information for its own competitive advantage. Further reading: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/google-gmail-tracks-purchase...
Also, your comments seem to be auto-dead for the last couple days. Glancing at your comment history, I'm not sure why. I vouched to recover this one. You might want to check in with Dan (hn@ycombinator.com) and ask him what's up.
I hope that's not true. People (and bots) should not be reading mails addressed to them. (Analogous to it being illegal to read physical letters addressed to someone else)
Else maybe the EU needs to make some new laws again. :-/
I've had my bank close my account and send all the money in it as a cashier's check to my sister's house. They never told me and let me keep depositing money (at one point I had ~$5k in there.) The only way I was able to figure it out was when payments stopped working and I physically went in to try to withdraw the money I needed.
Missing: Q: "So can I just walk into one of those zillion bank branches you've set up in the last 10 years, squatting on all that storefront real estate that could be used for real businesses that sell me something, attract tourists, or whatever?"
A: "No, they're just for show. We don't actually do any business there, we just rent that space to piss you all off, as a visible display of what we can do with all those excessive fees we charge you."
That's not true, they maintain them as a backup in case you corner a customer service representative on the phone and they are about to have to do what you asked. That's when they tell you you need to visit a branch.
Yup. I was so fed up with Bank of America’s crappy service I tried to close my account with them. It took 4 months to do so, and at least 8 hrs of back and forth between phone reps, online reps, and in person reps.
First I was told to withdraw the remaining funds to get the balance to zero. Before I did that, I asked them if doing so would automatically close the account without incurring some kinds of fees? crickets
Then I was promised when I got ahold of their specific account closing department that I would be sent a small cashiers check for the small balance I kept in there to avoid incurring fees. Never arrived.
Then I kept getting calls for someone with a different name from the bank. I eventually figured out they were trying to call about this issue, but literally has a completely different name that made no sense.
When I called them back anojt it to close the account again, I was told I needed to go to a branch. Well, all branches are closed due to Covid. Then I have to call again, well, there is a specific branch that is open - great! Too bad I couldn’t find it via the branch locator the first time.
Go to that specific branch - closing an account requires an appointment.
Me: Ok, when is the next appointment?
Them: since you’re closing an account, you need a specific kind of rep. The soonest appointment is a week from now.
Them: but you can close the account by withdrawing funds to zero
Me: will that actually close the account without incurring some kind of negative balance due to fees?
Them: looks nervous uh no
Me: I see, it’s almost like you all are trying to get me to not actually close my account due to some incentive structure and tack on fees. I’m about this close from suing you in small claims court for not actually letting me close my account.
Them: look at each other super nervously ehem, I can book that appointment for you.
Me: ok
And somehow, when I get home after this, I get a text that my account has actually been closed and the cashiers check gets in my hand through the mail before the actual appointment they scheduled me.
It’s just adding bullshit process to provide friction to keep some metric up near as I can tell.
See: Bank of America's policy on two-party "and" checks.
I walk in, having had a checking account with them for decades: "Hi, I need to deposit a two-party check into my account here. This is the other party with me, and we're happy to show ID."
Door greeter / agent: "Sure, I can do that for you." {Proceeds to verify my information and set up deposit on her tablet} "Hmm." {Walks over to her manager, discusses}
Manager: "Hello. I'm sorry, we only allow two-party checks to be deposited into joint accounts that list both parties."
Me: "I have the other party standing right here, with ID."
Manager: "That's our policy. Even if I pushed it through, the central system would kick it back out."
... which is a policy they can have. But the annoyance to me, is that it's a policy they choose to have, rather than a policy they're required to have. Corrections welcome, but there's no law that mandates this handling of two-party "and" checks. It's just risk mitigation on BoA's part.
Which, if a multi-decade relationship with your customer doesn't facilitate taking additional risk (over a <$1k check) in the interest of customer satisfaction... why would I do business with you?
It's not supposed to, but it does go through sometimes
Actually, it is supposed to.
The 1990's-era legislation that made phone deposits possible shifted the liability and some other regulatory details a bit to make it possible. The verification and liability is less strict with an online deposit than an in-person deposit.
At the time, it was a big news story. The rule change was originally intended to allow businesses to deposit checks from their offices with a device over a modem for speed and security.
When it was in the news, people were up in arms because it shifted the liability for certain types of fraud onto the consumer, and away from the banks. Consumer advocates saw it as a big money-grab by the evil mustache-twirling bankers.
The result is that now when you get something like a random unexpected electric company refund check in the mail, you can deposit it with your phone.
I've deposited checks that were not even signed and made out to another (and the person who gave me the check didn't sign it over either!) on mobile banking apps. I never sign the check for mobile or check the box on the check if there is one.
I've read a number of BoA horror stories on HN, and didn't think anything of them. I just assumed there were a lot because BoA is big in California.
Then, recently, I tried to deal with BoA customer service.
- I'm saving up a few thousand dollars for a Christmas present, but don't want my wife to see the money in our joint account at another bank.
- Since I have BoA credit card with almost nothing on it, and a BoA next door, I decided to open a savings account.
- End of the month, I go online to pay my BoA credit card, and I can't. There is no way on the web site to pay with anything other than the savings account, and no way to re-add my previous external account that I've used with BoA for the last 10 years.
- Call customer service. Wait on hold for three hours, getting transferred twice.
- Finally get someone at BoA to tell me that because I added the savings account, my status changed and I have to add new payment accounts all over.
- Explain again that there is no way to add an external payment account.
- Two more transfers, and someone confirms that the web site is screwed up. Hold on while I transfer you to that department.
- 20 minutes later, someone comes on the line to tell me that tech customer service doesn't work on Saturdays anymore and to check back in a few days and maybe it will magically fix itself.
- I decide to go to the branch. Open BoA app to check its hours, and it's marked "Temporarily closed." So is the next closest BoA. And the one after that. The nearest BoA that is going to be open on Monday is two hours away, according to the app.
- Monday I go out for coffee, which takes me past the BoA branch next door. It's open. People inside. Everything looks normal, contrary to the app telling me it's supposed to be closed.
- I go into the branch, pay off my BoA card, empty the savings account, close both accounts.
Bank of America doesn't deserve to represent itself as the bank of America. It should be called the Bank of Dipshits.
> Bank of America doesn't deserve to represent itself as the bank of America
Oh, this story is quintessential US Americana, right down to the name.
I've long maintained that one of the biggest gifts to US corporations is how few of their customers visit other countries. If more of them ever saw functional banking (or humane healthcare, or competitive telephony and broadband, or a number of other things), a lot of rents would evaporate.
It is, indeed. BofA is only as big as it is because it was allowed to Kirby up dozens of regional banks in the late 90s/early 00s. It did nothing to earn its position and has done nothing but exploit it since. It is a poster child for anti-customer consolidation.
A tangent: Reading your comment, at first I smiled at the verb 'Kirby', thinking it was a reference to the vacuum company... then I realized that it may be a reference to the videogame character.
Then I wondered if the video game character's name is derived from the vacuum company, or is it a coincidence? Am I an idiot for never noticing that before?
Like most of my trains of thought, it ends with me cursing myself for being an idiot.
Even before phone apps and internet banking BofA was godawful. They'd process debits first, issue overdraft fees, then process credits at the end of the day. As a poor college student in the mid 2000's I got screwed over twice before I closed my accounts there and haven't used them since.
Then at one point I was between jobs and filed for unemployment - which conveniently came on a BofA debit card. 10 years later and I still get an email about some kind of monthly statement for the $0.43 on there. I tried to close out the account and gave up after several attempts, and just marked it as spam.
Don't set up a payment option on the credit card's website. Use the bill pay ability at the web site of the bank where your checking account lives. Now all your payment information is in one place and, more importantly, under your control via pushing payments from your checking to whomever instead of allowing a bunch of companies to pull money from your account.
> which is a policy they can have. But the annoyance to me, is that it's a policy they choose to have, rather than a policy they're required to have.
The problem isn't necessarily with the policy as such; it's perhaps an entirely sensible policy to have – I don't even know what a "two-party and check" is so have no opinion on that as such – but the real problem is that there is no way a human applying basic "common sense" judgement can override the policy.
A lot of things are now like this: "this is the rule", "computer says no", with little recourse. The complexity of reality can't be captured in a rulebook or computer program, so lots of people in different "unusual" (although they're usually not that unusual) situations hit brick walls for a lot of basic stuff.
It's slowly crushing out collective souls and stripping us of our humanity.
> Missing: Q: "So can I just walk into one of those zillion bank branches you've set up in the last 10 years, squatting on all that storefront real estate that could be used for real businesses that sell me something, attract tourists, or whatever?"
> A: "No, they're just for show. We don't actually do any business there...
This is what I don't get about BECU being the most popular credit union in Puget Sound. Every time there's a thread on Reddit asking about the credit unions people use or if there's a newcomer who's at a social gathering or just on Twitter, BECU is always the recommended place. I don't understand, since their branches are solely there to sell you a mortgage.
Yet everyone is mad that Chase is opening branches all over town where you can do actual banking with an actual human.
(I'm neither a Chase nor BECU customer, for what it's worth.)
Interesting, I've had opposite experiences. In fact last time I went into a chase bank the teller refused to help me but "offered" to help me download chase app and do what I was trying to do in the app. Meanwhile I've gone into BECU a few times and they've always been able to help.
Do you mind if I ask what BECU can't do in a branch? I'm genuinely curious because your experience seems so different from mine.
For example, this week I needed some cost basis information on a transfer between accounts with unlike registration. Couldn't get it online. I emailed them. They responded via secure message with exactly what I wanted in 2 business days.
Probably means the internal messaging system on Fidelity’s page.
FWIW, I also think Fidelity has fantastic customer service, especially in-person. It’s their differentiator and competitive advantage. Wouldn’t be surprised if OPs question was not simple at all.
Agreed; an ugly but reasonable solution to a real problem. However! I wish they'd put a URL in the email which brought you directly to the message in question once you logged in, rather than forcing you to navigate through the whole web UI and messaging system to find it. They never do that.
Capital One is pretty solid in that you don't have to deal with them because they have sane tech. It's the only bank that has ever really helped me when I was in poverty.
A short conversation with Blue Shield of California last month:
BS: Have a question? Ask us via this very useful secure messaging form!
Me: Great! Can you explain the difference between these two arcane out-of-pocket limits that you display that are un-Googleable and nowhere in your documentation that I can never find anyway?
BS: Sure! We will wait two days and then send you an email suggestively titled "a response to your inquiry" that really just contains an attached PDF with a link to a completely different portal where you have to register a new account to download an image of a scanned fax that tells you to call customer service where you can wait on hold forever to answer whatever question it was you had that we also don't remember! Yay secure messaging!
Me: Wow such technology! I now very understand the difference between "out of pocket max" and "max out of pocket max"! I feel much secure that I won't go bankrupt the next time I have an incident and get treated by the wrong doctor at the right hospital! Thanks, 2022!
Generally, anything not-for-profit and older than 40 years is a technological shit-show.
There's neither the individual or management will to successfully migrate or upgrade at the pace required. Consequently, everything is held together with duct tape and person-hours.
I worked for a 80+ year old non-profit. Their tech was definitely a shit show before I turned it around. I won't be surprised if it ends up degrades into a shit show again in a decade or so.
Almost immediately after you left, they promptly lost the admin password, Phyllis in accounting said, "why don't we just go back to copy machines and filing cabinets, we know how those work" and they unplugged all your computers.
What the actual fuck. If you ever come to Australia the Commonwealth Bank and Australia Post apps are two examples to restore faith in humanity.
They are functional, practical, reasonably intuitive and they keep improving with actual valuable and handy features. Every now and then it still boggles my mind when I use them.
Whenever there is a request for reviews I make sure to mention it. I hope the dev team is paid well because they clearly deserve it.
To be fair, the other bank I use, Handelsbanken, is also sane: displays all the info you need, gives you quick access to functionality etc. Not without its issues, but Klarna takes the cake :))
Max Out of Pocket:
This is the yearly maximum accumulation that an insured individual must pay before the insurer takes on full financial responsibility for subsequent claims. This comes in generally one of two flavors: a family or individual.
The individual is straightforward. If you have a MOOP of $1000, and you've paid out $1000 in copays or coinsurance after meeting your deductible on just you, you no longer owe any contribution on claims for you, for that year. However, someone else in your family on your insurance will have to have their copays/coinsurance paid until either their individual MOOP is hit, or between the two of you you accunulate enough for the family MOOP to kick in, which depending on the nature of the plan, will start covering expenses for everyone else in the family unit.
Out_of_pocket_max is likely the individual MOOP.
Max_out_of_pocket_max is probably a terribly named family or Group MOOP.
These should not be confused with policy or lifetime maximums, which are caps to the amount of a specific benefit the insurer is willing to pay out for you as an individual period.
I know for a fact places screw that all up. I spend a large chunk of time making sure things like that do not stick around.
When I called, I was told that it's there to show that the OOP max for in-network and out-of-network providers isn't summed to get my total OOP max; instead it's just equal to my OON OOP max. (Of course, this plan makes it hard to go bankrupt, unlike all ACA plans. That was a bit of literary liberty.)
Ah... So they're differentiating MOOP levels they'll honor based on the provider in question.
I'm guessing they probably have some funneling arrangement that recoups the extra spend they'd incur from the potentially more frequent MOOP attainment in network.
Cute, but it really kinda sidesteps the concept of "Max out of pocket". I sense an MBA at work.
Replying here because I couldn't respond to your other comment. All the ACA plans I've looked at pay nothing for OON, so in effect there's no maximum I may pay, right? I'm curious about this redlining solution. How do you decide how much you'll pay them?
Basically, you can just piggy-back essentially on your insurer's bargaining power by agreeing to what they would agree to pay +/- a percent on top. The provider can still refuse to provide service to the updated terms of course, but it puts the ball in their court, and insulates you from "surprise" bills.
Just blindly signing it means exactly what is on that sheet of paper, that the provider settles on an amount, and you are accepting an obligation to repay it. Redlining and setting a ceiling on what you're willing/able to pay shows good faith. Which if it comes to a court case, goes a long way.
No, the deductible is much lower. This is the maximum I can spend out of pocket in a year. But most ACA ("Obamacare") plans have no maximum for our of network providers.
Now keep in mind, as mentioned earlier, if you go to an out-of-network provider, and get billed for the balance of what that provider charges and your insurance won't cover, that is now between you and the provider because the insurance claim is technically complete.
This is why in some cases you may want to redline the financial responsibility statement and specify you will pay up to a set amount over what your insurer disburses. Technically, the provider can come back and grumble, but if you absolutely cannot afford to get nailed with a notorious "surprise" medical bill, that's a much more "good faith" way to approach the transaction.
You probably pay way more in taxes. If I was given a choice between (1) an additional 20% income tax and free healthcare, or (2) crazy $10k/year out of pocket maximum, I'll choose 2 without a blink.
And at some point, perhaps you'll still get reasonable health care without it being tied to some employment (whether or not you were/are highly paid). Much harder to rely on that in the US.
We don't use tax money to bulk buy food, or auto repair, or fuel, or computers, or phones, or banking, or any other modern good or service that is essential and required for every member of society.
Why do we do it for health care or health care insurance? If the justification is "everyone needs it and you will die without it" then shouldn't farms and supermarkets also be public utilities? The line seems entirely arbitrary to me. Water yes, but food no? Why education and healthcare? Why not heating and electric power?
The added benefit of letting people arrange it individually is that those with a higher risk appetite are not forced into it (at significant personal expense) against their will/consent, too.
> We don't use tax money to bulk buy food, or auto repair, or fuel, or computers, or phones, or banking, or any other modern good or service that is essential and required for every member of society.
We certainly do: taxes fund social programs like welfare and subsidies, which allow every member of society to afford a baseline level of food, housing and transportation.
Back in World War II, food supplies were rationed precisely because everyone needs them, so food vendors have certainly faced regulation in times of scarcity. Farmers still receive sizable EU and US subsidies. [1] [2]
In the US, the government purchased bulk amounts of foods for decades. [3]
> We don't use tax money to bulk buy food, or auto repair, or fuel, or computers, or phones.
We don't buy bulk food because it's a commodity with low entry costs, and between subsidies and SNAP we can keep food almost universally available. We should be doing more, because people do fall through the gaps and our agriculture subsidies could be better directed.
We subsidize transportation and oil to keep costs down. We should do more to expand free at the point of access mass transit.
There are means-tested programs for cell phones paid entirely by tye federal government (you may hear them coloquially referred to as "Obamaphones").
Many people believe basic, low cost banking services should be provided through the USPS. I believe Senator Elizabeth Warren is an advocate for this policy.
> Why do we do it for health care or health care insurance?
Health care and health insurance are different from the other examples you listed. If a person is in dire need of care, they are unlikely to be able to shop around. They might not even be in a condition to prove they are able to pay, so we require hospitals to treat people without waiting for such proof, which means providers can take on significant losses which need to be covered.
And to keep costs down in such a system where you cover these cases, it makes sense to invest in preventative care, up to the point of paying people to get it.
Entry costs to starting a hospital or becoming a health care professional are high because people want some standard of safety. This lumits competition that makes your other examples work.
> Water yes, but food no? Why education and healthcare? Why not heating and electric power?
Yes to all of the above. Since you added heating and electric, often low income will qualify someone for assistance, eapecially heating in colder regions. Since the market functions well enough for people with sone money, means testing seems to work well enough here.
> The added benefit of letting people arrange it individually is that those with a higher risk appetite are not forced into it (at significant personal expense) against their will/consent, too.
The challenge is that if you make people arrange it individually, there is incentive to underestimate the risk (higher risk means higher premiums) and then they might need care that they cannot afford. The health care system sometimes still incurs this cost because they might have to provide emergency treatment (and many conditions untreated due to costs can become emergencies).
I regret leaving my grandfathered plan from 2010 - every year I got a threat saying it would be gone next year, then magically one more 'extension' with a threat that it would be gone next year again. And the price kept going up. Switched to ACA plan and... I missed this 'no max' stuff. Fingers crossed I don't need healthcare if I'm ... you know, outside whatever 'network' might happen to take me in for care.
This is almost true: you will, in fact, be forever on the hook for any medical expenses charged which exceed the "reasonable" limits your insurer has set for each given service, even after you've exceeded your MOOP. So if your physical therapist charges $150/hour and your insurer reimburses $120/hour, you'll still owe $60 OOP for two hours of therapy even if you've exceeded your MOOP. Ask me how I know.
Ah, but I bet if you look carefully, it's probably hidden in the EOB or benefit booklet somewhere, if not, somebody has dome writing to do. Even then, that is not a byproduct of the insurance, but of the "Consent to be treated and statement of patient financial responsibility" form that you almost certainly signed when you went to the doctor. That 120 dollars was still paid without coinsurance or copay from you after MOOP was attained, your physician is just falling back on what you signed to make up the difference.
I hate medical billing to the point I dove in to try to figure out how it all works.
This happened to me and I found the practice extremely deceptive.
In California it is nearly impossible to find therapy or similar services that don’t charge much more than the per service maximums allowed by Anthem Blue Cross (and likely others).
This is primarily about out-of-network care, but good luck finding a competent therapist in-network in the Bay Area.
For example, the max paid for a therapy visit might be $120 while the providers typically charge $160-180/session.
On my plan, out-of-network providers were supposed to be 70% covered but I only learned after the fact that coverage was 70% up to the plan max for the stated service.
How was one to know the plan max per service? Therein lies the trick, they won’t tell you until you are on the plan and even then you cannot simply ask for a list of limits by service. You have to ask one by one after you have already committed to the plan.
The plan providers do not proactively disclose even the existence of these per service limits during open enrollment, and certainly not the detailed limits.
The plan providers continue to do this year after year despite knowing full well that their limits are well below market rates. As a result predicting out of pocket costs for therapy or other mental health services is next to impossible.
It feels fraudulent and deceptive even though I suspect they have excellent lawyers who keep them coloring just inside the lines so as not to get sued.
Still, I sometimes wonder if a class-action lawsuit might be the best solution.
That was my experience in fact. Therapists would participate in-network while young and inexperienced but would move out of network once they had more experience, a specialization, or a more established practice.
What that meant was if you had advanced needs you ended up paying out of pocket a lot.
Huh.
Ya know what? I'm going to go look through some paperwork to see if I can find regular omissions of that sort, because now that you mention it, that seems a rather glaring omission if true.
This sounds exactly like my kids school district. They send an email telling you you have a "secure message" and you need to log in to see it. So you try to sign up to see the message, but can't because you don't have the password. So you try calling them and they say they will reply via email. What they mean is that they will send you a secure message about your inability to receive secure messages. So you call again and they transfer you to a number that is only open between 9am and 4pm on weekdays. So you call back on Monday and, because this is the start of term, can't get through, like, at all, ever. So eventually on Wednesday you get through and they transfer you again, only this time you manage to invoke XKCD 806 and get a real person who knows how to "reset" the password you never set in the first place. So you finally manage to log in to the secure messaging portal and look at the email. Oh, it's a PDF download. You download the PDF and see it's a physical letter that has been scanned in to the system manually (seriously!). The letter? The reason you went to all this trouble? It's a welcome letter to the new "secure messaging" platform, with instructions about how to reset your password...
It's not like Google or Amazon is better in customer friendliness. (Amazon at least has a working customer service where they get you a refund even if they have absolutely no idea wtf happened to your precious order.)
The one that asks for an email address and then tells you that email address isn’t in the system despite the same system sending you email? Yeah, I did. Many times.
No. No more. No more guessing, no more trouble shooting or debugging. I don't care and OP probably has more important things to do too. Sure, I can do it. Exceptionally well too! But, they aren't paying me, and users aren't shouldn't be their free, outsourced QA team.
The password reset field accepts a certain character but the login form sanitizes it differently so it won't be accepted. Or even trying to set a password with that character results in an "HTTP 50x error something went horribly wrong".
It's hard to recover from the memories of wasted time, effort, and frustration when the schools when distance-learning only in 2020.
"We will start using Google Classroom for all communication, class materials, lesson videos, live meetings, and grades"
Sure. Good. Come grade time:
"Your child is missing a lot of work. It's all due in a week."
Kid, you have to do x,y,z missing assignments listed on Google Classroom.
"Your child has already completed x."
It was marked missing on Google Classroom.
"Please refer to Infinite Campus to see which assignments are missing."
Ok...I signed up for Infinite Campus, and I don't see anything.
"Did you use the user/pass we automatically created for each parent?"
What? No.
"Sir, we sent out this information weeks ago."
Search...search...manual search...I don't see it on Google Classroom.
"Oh, we sent it through ClassDojo."
---
This is very simplified. Google Classroom required teacher-provided codes to join "classes" for each subject, provided through...school email! School email is an unused morass for Google Classroom notification emails for every action your child or their teacher makes. Get a teacher message on ClassDojo? Sorry, can't tell if it was a mass message or directed at you, so you have to clarify whether it applies to your kid given their IEP. Got two parents using Dojo? Sorry, can't see if the other parent has already responded to a teacher message. Completed an assignment on Classroom but didn't click "Turn in"? Missing. Can't find where to enter answers? Oops, your child knows to use ImagineMathExploreLinkConnect to get to that material. Completed on that fourth-party platform, but didn't go back to Classroom to click "Turn in?" Missing. Triple checked everything but still a bunch of missing assignments in Infinite Campus? Teacher is behind on grading, and there's no way to know that, either from Infinite Campus or Google Classroom, but it was in the class newsletter we emailed to your child.
Maybe not all employers, but at least mine does not realize quite how much further parents fell behind that year than those without school-age kids, on balance.
When schools excitedly announce a new platform for learning anything, I want to punch myself in the face.
I hear you man. For me the most frustrating part about all of this is each platform comes with its own algorithmic placement system that has to learn your kid's level. My eldest kid has high-IQ exceptional needs, and by the time the algorithms would learn her level and place her accurately where she would make some progress, the classroom had already moved on to the next platform. I think I counted five different platforms for math in the past year, sometimes with multiple different logins on the same platform. It's a travesty and her growth has come to a complete halt since I stopped teaching her and gave her back to the school. My heart breaks but what can you do. As a kindergartener she was factorizing numbers in the bathtub and now as a third grader "Xtra Math" is asking her to identify whether a shape is a triangle or a circle.
My son is the same. He started kindergarten completely comfortable with negative numbers (we just always drew the number line with both positive and negative parts) and basic algebra and only was allowed to test to enter the gifted program in third grade.
They are finally doing algebra again now that he is in fourth grade (they do math grades 3 and 4 in third grade and 5 and 6th grade math in 4th grade) but if we hadn’t set him up with a tutor a couple of years ago he’d have given up on school completely.
My younger son in 1st grade has autism (and is also gifted), to the point that he is legally supposed to have a permanent paraeducator with him at all times to help him cope with classes and physically help him if he needs help with basic tasks like holding his pencil, or realizing that he is frustrated and can’t communicate that.
Covid meant no paraeducator. Oh, they had one on the payroll, of course, but they were virtual. So the person who was supposed to help my son hold a pencil and detect he was frustrated and so on, was just a person on a zoom call.
My son lost almost a year of learning because of covid. It would have been more but we sued the school district to demand they at least put a plan in place and miraculously the day they were served with the papers, they told us “oh, we were just about to have a solution for you” and miraculously the same week, he was back in school with his para helping him with the virtual lessons.
My youngest daughter started kindergarten during covid. Everything was online. Her assignments were all in class dojo or maybe google classroom. All of the assignments had written instructions for her to follow. She was just starting Kindergarten and couldn’t exactly read well enough to follow the instructions.
All of this mean my wife and I basically spent all day as full-time teachers aides, because the kids couldn’t be left for even a few minutes by themselves. This is a difficult thing to do when also working full time.
Covid especially sucked for families with young special needs children. I think these kids were done a huge disservice.
That's a strikingly similar situation to ours. Our 4th grader has autism and needed special education services, but of course those didn't exist. At the same time, our typically developing kid was starting kindergarten virtually. At one point the teacher booted him from the class meeting because he was drawing a picture instead of writing words. She told us to ensure that he only joins class ready to learn.
All I can say is I'm glad we are all back in-person. The full-time dual-career parents as teacher's aides life was a fever dream of nearly snapping daily.
As a final anecdote: our kids had a full-time gym teacher. They were supposed to have “gym” lessons three times a week.
For the entirety of covid, their “lesson” was a single powerpoint slide with the words “go play” on it.
That was the entirety of the work that needed to be done by the gym teacher for a year - post that one slide to google classroom at the appropriate times.
Great, now just do the same thing for making all hospitals in the state (and later the nation) forced to bill at "in network" rates. then with a final step of capping the premiums paid according to income with the rest automatically covered by social programs, the USA might finally get to something sort of like a sane healthcare system.
Last time my wife went to a hospital in California, they delayed care by like half an hour over insurance and then didn't use it, so she got to spend a few days on the phone half a year later when each doctor who managed to visit the room for a few seconds sent us separate bills at the uninsured rate.
I heard somewhere that telegraph is a legitimate form of communication for some official routes - unless they aren't specifically prohibited. Has anyone tried this? I would reallt like to force my bank to respond to my telegraphs... or pony express letters
At my university there was a rumour that you were still allowed to submit your thesis in Latin. I think some people were tempted to try it but I’m not aware of anyone who did (or who pored over the regulations to find out if it was true)
I’m reminded of the unconfirmed stories of a student who exercised “Gentlemen sitting examinations may request and require Cakes and Ale,” and was given burgers and soft drinks but fined for failing to wear a sword.
Never happened. They never pick up the phone, and they don't have any other way to contact them after you applied for benefits. I tried for weeks to resolve an issue with an application for my father, a dozen of calls, every time being on hold for hours. Sometimes the automated system says "leave your number and someone will call you back tomorrow at a certain time". That's a lie, no one has ever called back.
Wait, so the two examples given are someone who can't figure out what their out-of-pocket costs will be, and someone who hasn't heard back about an application, and your conclusion is that universal health insurance, which wouldn't have any out-of-pocket costs or out-of-network doctors and wouldn't have applications because everyone would already have it ... would be a bad thing?
That seems a very strange conclusion to me. Health care in the US is a mess right now, public or private, largely because of the mess caused by extreme privatization. Half of the problems people have with health care would vanish overnight if we had universal health coverage.
it still will be better than what we have now. medicare spends 95% of it's budget on health care. most private insurance spends 20 to 30% on hiring people to make up reasons to deny your claim.
I know this is going to sound odd, but this is the exact thing you call your House Reps office and explain your problem. The https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representati... site will give the phone number, but their website often has a local office number. Most effective Congress folks staffs know how to deal with this type of thing.
Email from the dutch government: You have a message from <organization>. Log in to My Government to view.
Me: logging in to My Government using DigiD, which takes some effort, like five steps between two different sites and an app, but at least seems to be secure.
My Government message: you have a message from <organization>. Log in to <organization> portal to view message.
Me: Logging in to <organization> portal, again using DigiD (same steps).
<organization> portal message: There is a new document for you to download at My Documents in our portal.
Me: Wow, I don't even have to log in again, that's great! Document is not in the list, though. O, you have to select unread documents, otherwise you only get the old ones. Sure, makes sense.
Document: You student loan interest has been changed. We will send you your new monthly repayment amount soon.
Me: Great, glad I spent an hour finding out what was in that document...
My ex job at a courthouse, handwriting documents by pencil was about as performant as using C vs python compared to the computing system. There needs to be a large computing swipe to turn the tool back into a tool and not a straightjacket. Companies incentives are just not there.
Then why even bother? Really? You bank with some one that you feel like is good, but you won't tell people the name? Fine, you think that reveals TMI. Then don't tell us who you bank with, but tell us what bank you feel is good and the maybe some supporting reasons. You could do that without, "that's who I bank with".
Otherwise, this was a completely wasted/pointless use of electrons.
The question, though: is that to avoid more targeted attacks against you (like not telling people you own gold or bitcoin) or to avoid your bank becoming so successful that they can use their market position to become abusive to customers (like not telling people where you get your news on the off chance that you have a trustworthy source of news)?
There are quite a few local credit unions that I've heard good things about. Some are run in a way that all the profits are equally divided by the account holders (after expenses like comp for the employees). Some also offer credit cards and mortgages.
Credit Unions are usually hyper-local or for special interest groups so you'd need to look around by you.
Charles Schwab has been great for me. Specifically for the stuff in the article, statements back to when I opened it in 2012 are available in my portal and their bill pay worked flawlessly for me. On top of that, they have US based customer support, they refund atm fees, and their fees are about the lowest out there.
The only downside that I've run into is that they don't have branches that take cash deposits.
Yep. And the good ones tend to be smaller or regional chains.
At a certain size you just become too big to be competent, and the incentives get FUBAR. After that they don't really care about customer satisfaction because they're really focused on investors or the next 1mm corporate customers.
If you're looking for good technical support and features you're not going to get it with your local credit union, they're even worse than the major banks.
If my local credit union has an accessible branch office where I can speak to a human who can assist me, I have no need for technical support. Which is the way I prefer it anyways. Most financial corp tech that I've had to deal with has been trapped in an uncanny valley, doing a horrifying ineffective mimicry of secure services and account management. If they're incapable of crossing the divide to being actually good, I'd rather they'd just stay on the no-tech side.
I've recently been going through my password manager and closing inactive accounts. 9 out of 10 websites don't have a "close account" function, you have to talk to the support. Unfortunately these conversations are often similar to the ones in the article. You get to talk to 5 different agents, you receive a confirmation your account is closed but your login credentials still work, eventually your login credentials become invalid but they still send promotional email to your email address, and so on.
In practice, a lot of companies lie and may not actually have functionality to delete accounts. A UK fintech claimed they closed my account, while in reality they changed the email to <username>VOID@<domain> and presumably suspended future logins, but guess what, all the data is internally still there including the foreign key relationships which by themselves are unique enough and can be used to reidentify me and/or correlate my activity across other services.
Yes - that's how I found out. A company that was supposed to delete my data as per the GDPR (or at the very least retain the minimum amount of data required for legal purposes) was sending me all kinds of emails to the "VOID" address, clearly suggesting they just changed it but otherwise left my account intact, most likely because they didn't actually design the system to support being able to delete user accounts.
Holy fuck, what if I sign up for <someonesemailVOID@theirdomain.com> (this will work for a ridiculous number of people if you just wait to get the GMail they use for everything or something)
That’s a shockingly bad kludge though. You’d at the very least expect them to change it to an email they control. I mean, it would still be a shit workaround but at least it wouldn’t be trivially exploitable.
I've given up on reporting many breaches to my country's regulator (the ICO in the UK) because they are completely useless.
First of all, the system operates on a complaint basis - they're not interested in being handed evidence of GDPR breaches, they're only "interested" (in quotes because the entire process feels like they're being forced to do something and do the bare minimum, as opposed to genuinely caring about protecting & defending citizens' privacy) in complaints where you didn't get your way. Imagine if the police wasn't interested in the location of a wanted, violent criminal and turned people away with "come back when you've actually been shot by him".
The complaints process puts the burden of investigating, documenting the breach and verifying further compliance onto you. It is extremely admin-heavy and requires you to first argue with the company and give them 30 days (more in certain specific scenarios) to respond, so a malicious actor can drag out the process for months before you can even proceed with a complaint to the regulator, and once the regulator takes action it is up to you to assess whether they now comply, and if not, go through the whole process again.
Finally, if you've made it through thus far and actually have a valid complaint that doesn't give these lazy idiots a technicality to use as an excuse to close your complaint, it'll rot in a queue for months, and when it actually gets processed and actioned, the only outcomes I've had so far (including for a company clearly acting in bad faith and probably breaking more laws than just the GDPR) is the ICO sending a letter which the company can ignore in total impunity, with the real-world penalty for ignoring it being another letter.
Imposing such a "penalty" obviously requires going through this whole process again so in the real-world very few people will make it this far to begin with, let alone following up on further non-compliance.
I'm also doubtful of their technical proficiency so I'm afraid they can trivially be defeated by the company using some technobabble to justify why they can't delete accounts if there's no expert on hand to debunk the BS excuses.
It is a war of attrition in which the regulator (at least in the UK) is in cahoots with the enemy.
The sorts of companies that don't have an online mechanism to delete your account are the same kinds of companies that have never heard of, or don't care about the the GDPR.
Actually, it's exceedingly common with typical RDBMS that deletes are highly deleterious and time costly transactions to process die to locking database tables for a copious amount of time, bringing the system to a screeching halt. This is why general practice is to modify the the data in place and leave it there in an OLTP system.
I mean, technically speaking, actually deleting data without physically destroying the drive is pretty hard, especially with transistor-based dead storage !
I've always wondered whether GDPR just closed their eyes on that, or if it was so that the process of later restoring data was flagrant enough that it would be hard to hide upon inspection...
Oh yes. Totally different based on whether a company's execs hate customer service.
I'm not one of those of those though. I like my CS people to be able to do their jobs to keep the inevitable discruption to a customer's day minimized.
In the place I'm at, my Call Center is one of the happiest groups in the company. So many other places I've been that wasn't the case, do I made damn sure to deliver the best impl possible when I got the chance to oversee it.
I've implemented/maintained several. Call centers are one of those things you try to keep as simple as possible. Generally speaking, you've either got one big ole call center where anyone could take any caller at any time, or more specialized deals where the call center is divided into teams who are partitioned across the set of dial in numbers you prearrange the phone company to route.
To get your metrics right, you don't want your queues doing weird things, because it's hard enough making sure you have enough bodies to keep the queue times short enough your customers will even bother.
I put particular emphasis on getting my Call Center people exactly what they need to do their jobs quickly, because I don't see them as sunk cost, but an incestment in customer goodwill. Present a good face to the public, and be able to handle their problems, and they will either stick around or come back.
It's an interesting piece of technology to set up and QA. The meeting of telephony and Internet is a section of tech I like to dabble in, because phones are cool.
Neat, thanks for the interesting perspective. You mentioned you invest in your CS because you don't see it as a sunk cost. How were you able to convince the execs to give you money to do this? Sounds like a huge challenge
My brother worked at a major telecom call center as recently as last year, and for them the survey let you rate them something like 1-5. But anything under 5 was a "failure" and they were only allowed a few failures per day without repercussions. So fun.
(1) Most of the times, the problem does not get solved, requiring follow ups, but the surveys do not allow for marking that. This allows the representatives to set the problem aside without resulting in negative feedback for them.
(2) Many times, the representatives are helpless in solving the problem which has its roots in company's policies. (E.g., deletion of older digital statements in the OP). Giving a poor rating to the representative would not solve the real problem.
Both of the above can be fixed by having more options in the survey, but they don't include them.
The electronic statements are a blessing - just download and keep a copy. Exactly same as with paper ones, but with fewer steps.
All systems have their limits, but the current electronic ones are much better than the mortar and paper of yesteryear. I just finished renewing tags for my cars in 5 minutes from the comfort of my home, as compared to 2 hour Tag Office visit 20 years ago. (Happy bday to me!).
> Exactly same as with paper ones, but with fewer steps.
Actually with more steps.
Paper statements:
Bank generates paper statement on appointed day (work/time input by bank)
Bank packages paper statement in envelope and mails it (work/time input by bank)
Postal service delivers paper statement to my mailbox (work/time input by postal service)
I open paper statement (work/time input by me)
I scan paper statement (work/time input by me) (also can be optional if one prefers simply filing paper statements)
Electronic statement PDF's on bank website:
Bank (maybe) sends an email saying "your statement is ready"
I receive the email
I have to now open my password manager (work/time by me)
I have to log into bank website (work/time input by me)
I have to navigate to the "download your statement area" (which was designed to make the process of accessing the electronic statement as obtuse as possible) (work/time input by me)
I have to download the pdf (hopefully one click for me, but still a bit of work/time by me)
I have to rename the downloaded pdf to fit my filing convention (since, at best, it downloads as "statement.pdf" from the bank)
The major time input on my part with paper statements is the "scan" part, all the rest happens without any involvement of time, energy, or remembering it is "time" on my part.
The electronic statement download requires I actively expend time and effort to "go to their website, log in, find the download section, find the statement, and initiate the download".
What I want to see, but no bank offers it, is exactly the same flow as the paper/postal service, but substituting "email" for "postal service" and "pdf" for "paper". I upload a GPG public key, bank does the work of encrypting the pdf using my key and emailing me a copy (which makes "electronic statement" the same as paper, they do the work of remembering it is time and initiating the transmission). Then I save the pdf attachment from the email, decrypt it, and file it (saving the "scan" step from the paper copy flow).
On the bright side, now that you have step by step instructions for what needs to be done, you can hack together a script that will take you more time than doing that process manually would have for the rest of your life, but once you do you won't have to do it ever again.*
*unless the bank changes something about their email/website/pdf and that breaks the script
Or, perhaps more likely, a third party "security" department contacted by the bank implements some AI-backed system that notices your program scraping data and freezes your account.
Man, today’s world (I hesitate to call it “modern”) is so depressing in so many ways, and there are just no improvements in sight… humor is the only refuge.
However, if you can develop an in-person face-to-face rapport with someone at a bank, you'll find that they can bypass, sometimes, much of the infuriating petty bureaucracy.
I once had a bank employee print almost a ream of statements on the spot for me. I was almost in tears from the generosity of their time and effort. This was after going to a different branch an being told it would cost hundreds of dollars and take weeks because it was a "back-office" job.
Of course, but there are always going to be moments of friction, where some amount of "un-niceness" or even anger is at the very least understandable, if not justified.
Plus there's a difference between "be nice" and "go the extra effort to be nice". You can be perfectly friendly and nice and you can strike up some chit-chat and develop a low-key "relationship" with someone.
...well, relative to the response I got at a different branch, it was an incredible relief to me.
I knew that I needed someone to cut through bullshit red-tape for me. The first branch didn't do it, so I went to another and was lucky enough to find someone who wasn't a rule-following robot.
315 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadThe author’s issue comes down to banks being apparently uninterested in attracting business by solving actual customer pain points. Instead of solving real problems (terrible UX around a lack of statements, a malicious USB stick can drain your bank account, etc) the banks mostly just appear to trend chase (chat app! Crypto!).
Discover customer service is fantastic, with friendly interactive humans. I feel bad that Discover is not my main bank - I was going that way until a binding arbitration clause (with unreasonably short opt-out period) derailed the relationship. Ally is adequate, with the "standard" humans emulating robots relying on a case system. They will promise to call/email you back but never will, so you have to poll. Capital One 360 is at or below Ally - I had a poor experience with them settling an IRA, but they're ending their IRA business so who knows.
Unfortunately the Discover web / app is the worst of the three (although they support OFX Direct Connect last time I checked). Ally and Cap1 are nice (although there are some things you cannot do through the Cap1 web interface until you find a hidden link to the old web interface, which is still partially active). One standout feature of Cap1 is that you can open a reasonable line of credit for overdraft protection, if you don't generally have enough cash sitting around in an adjacent savings account.
P.S. I tried Alliant CU but was not impressed by their web interface or the hoops required to login to the app. Customer service seemed okay. Maybe in a different life.
P.P.S. Ally Invest is a completely separate creature from Ally Bank. I've had two different horrendous experiences with Ally Invest, and urge everyone to steer clear. The reps sound like they know what they're talking about (holdovers from TradeKing I presume), but are completely disconnected from the back office's procedures or activities.
What a coincidence.
Last month, my wife called Cap1 to close two department store credit card accounts she hasn't used in years.
This morning, I'm doing the bills and in the letters are two from Cap1 welcoming her to her new department store credit cards, here are all the terms and rates, and here's your first bill for $0. Happy spending!
I too was satisfied with my Cap1 cc account(s), tried their banking, and it was a total disaster. I eventually got my money out (through two systems that had been deprecated and closed down, with no apparen't notice to me), and left $10 in one account that still has paper statements - but no ability to sign in to the account any more.
I leave it alone to spite them.
As I said, the banks just love to sell you money at a very nice profit. What is the interest rate on those CCs? Is it anywhere near the current 'zero interest rate'?
I recently needed to make several medical appointments with a large healthcare provider. They had FOUR different online portals to "manage" my appointments and information. Navigating that was the exact same experience as the article, just without an actual person.
"No we won't do the one thing you need us to do, even though it is extremely simple and easy"
"Hey would you like to try this thing we spent a billion dollars on, you definitely don't need it but it's very trendy"
Strikes me that there is potential here for businesses to genuinely make customer service their focus, at the expense of profit or maybe by offering their services at a slightly higher premium. The Groundhog Day cycle of doom that we all feel all the time is deeply damaging to everyone concerned apart from shareholders. It'd be a breath of fresh air if companies went back to focusing on their customers first and foremost.
Note that they’re all primarily investment brokers that sometimes offer banking like services.
Also, considering that I'm listening to a talk about the computational complexity of economic planning on the side, the "we should recreate the entire financial system from first principles" part felt like a rude yet completely deserved callout.
Ooo, sounds interesting! Link?
Fwiw, I don't think economic planning is or was the main problem of socialism, more the information gathering that precedes it or the mechanism design that comes after, but I have a soft spot in my heart for anyone engaging productively with alternatives to capitalism, even if they aren't particularly fleshed out.
> bank: sir this conversation is recorded but I blinked my eyes very slowly twice
I laughed out loud at that.
Edit: Also, I never realized why Amazon stopped putting the name of the thing I purchased on the email receipt. Now it makes sense.
Can you enlighten me? Why don’t they include that in the email receipt?
Also, your comments seem to be auto-dead for the last couple days. Glancing at your comment history, I'm not sure why. I vouched to recover this one. You might want to check in with Dan (hn@ycombinator.com) and ask him what's up.
Else maybe the EU needs to make some new laws again. :-/
Crypto has issues but banks are worse.
Missing: Q: "So can I just walk into one of those zillion bank branches you've set up in the last 10 years, squatting on all that storefront real estate that could be used for real businesses that sell me something, attract tourists, or whatever?"
A: "No, they're just for show. We don't actually do any business there, we just rent that space to piss you all off, as a visible display of what we can do with all those excessive fees we charge you."
The only time you get any service is when you are looking to saddle yourself with debt or they have to comply due to regulations.
First I was told to withdraw the remaining funds to get the balance to zero. Before I did that, I asked them if doing so would automatically close the account without incurring some kinds of fees? crickets
Then I was promised when I got ahold of their specific account closing department that I would be sent a small cashiers check for the small balance I kept in there to avoid incurring fees. Never arrived.
Then I kept getting calls for someone with a different name from the bank. I eventually figured out they were trying to call about this issue, but literally has a completely different name that made no sense.
When I called them back anojt it to close the account again, I was told I needed to go to a branch. Well, all branches are closed due to Covid. Then I have to call again, well, there is a specific branch that is open - great! Too bad I couldn’t find it via the branch locator the first time.
Go to that specific branch - closing an account requires an appointment.
Me: Ok, when is the next appointment?
Them: since you’re closing an account, you need a specific kind of rep. The soonest appointment is a week from now.
Them: but you can close the account by withdrawing funds to zero
Me: will that actually close the account without incurring some kind of negative balance due to fees?
Them: looks nervous uh no
Me: I see, it’s almost like you all are trying to get me to not actually close my account due to some incentive structure and tack on fees. I’m about this close from suing you in small claims court for not actually letting me close my account.
Them: look at each other super nervously ehem, I can book that appointment for you.
Me: ok
And somehow, when I get home after this, I get a text that my account has actually been closed and the cashiers check gets in my hand through the mail before the actual appointment they scheduled me.
It’s just adding bullshit process to provide friction to keep some metric up near as I can tell.
See: Bank of America's policy on two-party "and" checks.
I walk in, having had a checking account with them for decades: "Hi, I need to deposit a two-party check into my account here. This is the other party with me, and we're happy to show ID."
Door greeter / agent: "Sure, I can do that for you." {Proceeds to verify my information and set up deposit on her tablet} "Hmm." {Walks over to her manager, discusses}
Manager: "Hello. I'm sorry, we only allow two-party checks to be deposited into joint accounts that list both parties."
Me: "I have the other party standing right here, with ID."
Manager: "That's our policy. Even if I pushed it through, the central system would kick it back out."
... which is a policy they can have. But the annoyance to me, is that it's a policy they choose to have, rather than a policy they're required to have. Corrections welcome, but there's no law that mandates this handling of two-party "and" checks. It's just risk mitigation on BoA's part.
Which, if a multi-decade relationship with your customer doesn't facilitate taking additional risk (over a <$1k check) in the interest of customer satisfaction... why would I do business with you?
Needless to say, I closed my BoA accounts.
Incidentally a BoA teller just told me yesterday that the phone all is not supposed to accept two party checks at all.
Actually, it is supposed to.
The 1990's-era legislation that made phone deposits possible shifted the liability and some other regulatory details a bit to make it possible. The verification and liability is less strict with an online deposit than an in-person deposit.
At the time, it was a big news story. The rule change was originally intended to allow businesses to deposit checks from their offices with a device over a modem for speed and security.
When it was in the news, people were up in arms because it shifted the liability for certain types of fraud onto the consumer, and away from the banks. Consumer advocates saw it as a big money-grab by the evil mustache-twirling bankers.
The result is that now when you get something like a random unexpected electric company refund check in the mail, you can deposit it with your phone.
Funny thing is she was able to open the account without input from me so I'm not sure what this policy is actually doing.
I've read a number of BoA horror stories on HN, and didn't think anything of them. I just assumed there were a lot because BoA is big in California.
Then, recently, I tried to deal with BoA customer service.
- I'm saving up a few thousand dollars for a Christmas present, but don't want my wife to see the money in our joint account at another bank.
- Since I have BoA credit card with almost nothing on it, and a BoA next door, I decided to open a savings account.
- End of the month, I go online to pay my BoA credit card, and I can't. There is no way on the web site to pay with anything other than the savings account, and no way to re-add my previous external account that I've used with BoA for the last 10 years.
- Call customer service. Wait on hold for three hours, getting transferred twice.
- Finally get someone at BoA to tell me that because I added the savings account, my status changed and I have to add new payment accounts all over.
- Explain again that there is no way to add an external payment account.
- Two more transfers, and someone confirms that the web site is screwed up. Hold on while I transfer you to that department.
- 20 minutes later, someone comes on the line to tell me that tech customer service doesn't work on Saturdays anymore and to check back in a few days and maybe it will magically fix itself.
- I decide to go to the branch. Open BoA app to check its hours, and it's marked "Temporarily closed." So is the next closest BoA. And the one after that. The nearest BoA that is going to be open on Monday is two hours away, according to the app.
- Monday I go out for coffee, which takes me past the BoA branch next door. It's open. People inside. Everything looks normal, contrary to the app telling me it's supposed to be closed.
- I go into the branch, pay off my BoA card, empty the savings account, close both accounts.
Bank of America doesn't deserve to represent itself as the bank of America. It should be called the Bank of Dipshits.
Oh, this story is quintessential US Americana, right down to the name.
I've long maintained that one of the biggest gifts to US corporations is how few of their customers visit other countries. If more of them ever saw functional banking (or humane healthcare, or competitive telephony and broadband, or a number of other things), a lot of rents would evaporate.
Then I wondered if the video game character's name is derived from the vacuum company, or is it a coincidence? Am I an idiot for never noticing that before?
Like most of my trains of thought, it ends with me cursing myself for being an idiot.
Then at one point I was between jobs and filed for unemployment - which conveniently came on a BofA debit card. 10 years later and I still get an email about some kind of monthly statement for the $0.43 on there. I tried to close out the account and gave up after several attempts, and just marked it as spam.
Don't set up a payment option on the credit card's website. Use the bill pay ability at the web site of the bank where your checking account lives. Now all your payment information is in one place and, more importantly, under your control via pushing payments from your checking to whomever instead of allowing a bunch of companies to pull money from your account.
The problem isn't necessarily with the policy as such; it's perhaps an entirely sensible policy to have – I don't even know what a "two-party and check" is so have no opinion on that as such – but the real problem is that there is no way a human applying basic "common sense" judgement can override the policy.
A lot of things are now like this: "this is the rule", "computer says no", with little recourse. The complexity of reality can't be captured in a rulebook or computer program, so lots of people in different "unusual" (although they're usually not that unusual) situations hit brick walls for a lot of basic stuff.
It's slowly crushing out collective souls and stripping us of our humanity.
Q: Well, at least I can still withdraw and deposit money there, right?
A: Actually, if you want to deposit coinage, we've outsourced that to home improvement stores instead.
(At least, that’s what Coinstar in the US has become.)
> A: "No, they're just for show. We don't actually do any business there...
This is what I don't get about BECU being the most popular credit union in Puget Sound. Every time there's a thread on Reddit asking about the credit unions people use or if there's a newcomer who's at a social gathering or just on Twitter, BECU is always the recommended place. I don't understand, since their branches are solely there to sell you a mortgage.
Yet everyone is mad that Chase is opening branches all over town where you can do actual banking with an actual human.
(I'm neither a Chase nor BECU customer, for what it's worth.)
Do you mind if I ask what BECU can't do in a branch? I'm genuinely curious because your experience seems so different from mine.
Hahahaha!
I wish this weren't true.
For example, this week I needed some cost basis information on a transfer between accounts with unlike registration. Couldn't get it online. I emailed them. They responded via secure message with exactly what I wanted in 2 business days.
2 days to receive answer to a simple question? Responded via secure message? What does that entail?
FWIW, I also think Fidelity has fantastic customer service, especially in-person. It’s their differentiator and competitive advantage. Wouldn’t be surprised if OPs question was not simple at all.
Governmental policy dictated by social media forces controlled by herds of solipsists I wouldn't trust to scratch their own arses.
With the power of distributed censorship. All of the dystopia but with nobody personally responsible for "being the hitler".
With fun tools like "shadowbanning". Which censors you without telling you why you were censored. Or even that you were censored.
And secret forbidden word lists!
We're augmenting the powers of insects with digital technology. This only creates giant insects.
https://youtu.be/G8R9OoQh4q0
I’ve never had any issues with them.
BS: Have a question? Ask us via this very useful secure messaging form!
Me: Great! Can you explain the difference between these two arcane out-of-pocket limits that you display that are un-Googleable and nowhere in your documentation that I can never find anyway?
BS: Sure! We will wait two days and then send you an email suggestively titled "a response to your inquiry" that really just contains an attached PDF with a link to a completely different portal where you have to register a new account to download an image of a scanned fax that tells you to call customer service where you can wait on hold forever to answer whatever question it was you had that we also don't remember! Yay secure messaging!
Me: Wow such technology! I now very understand the difference between "out of pocket max" and "max out of pocket max"! I feel much secure that I won't go bankrupt the next time I have an incident and get treated by the wrong doctor at the right hospital! Thanks, 2022!
Fin.
There's neither the individual or management will to successfully migrate or upgrade at the pace required. Consequently, everything is held together with duct tape and person-hours.
Everything new is the same. Because everything has to be disruptive innovative hockey stick growth bullshit.
Here's a screenshot of tha app for a Swedish bank, Klarna: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FHXG5bPX0AIC1oe?format=jpg&name=.... They are a bank. They offer credit cards, and fast online credit payments.
And no, "Payments" isn't a list of your payments you've done throught them, that's behind two or three clicks now. It's what you owe them.
They are functional, practical, reasonably intuitive and they keep improving with actual valuable and handy features. Every now and then it still boggles my mind when I use them.
Whenever there is a request for reviews I make sure to mention it. I hope the dev team is paid well because they clearly deserve it.
Max Out of Pocket: This is the yearly maximum accumulation that an insured individual must pay before the insurer takes on full financial responsibility for subsequent claims. This comes in generally one of two flavors: a family or individual.
The individual is straightforward. If you have a MOOP of $1000, and you've paid out $1000 in copays or coinsurance after meeting your deductible on just you, you no longer owe any contribution on claims for you, for that year. However, someone else in your family on your insurance will have to have their copays/coinsurance paid until either their individual MOOP is hit, or between the two of you you accunulate enough for the family MOOP to kick in, which depending on the nature of the plan, will start covering expenses for everyone else in the family unit.
Out_of_pocket_max is likely the individual MOOP. Max_out_of_pocket_max is probably a terribly named family or Group MOOP. These should not be confused with policy or lifetime maximums, which are caps to the amount of a specific benefit the insurer is willing to pay out for you as an individual period.
I know for a fact places screw that all up. I spend a large chunk of time making sure things like that do not stick around.
When I called, I was told that it's there to show that the OOP max for in-network and out-of-network providers isn't summed to get my total OOP max; instead it's just equal to my OON OOP max. (Of course, this plan makes it hard to go bankrupt, unlike all ACA plans. That was a bit of literary liberty.)
I'm guessing they probably have some funneling arrangement that recoups the extra spend they'd incur from the potentially more frequent MOOP attainment in network.
Cute, but it really kinda sidesteps the concept of "Max out of pocket". I sense an MBA at work.
Just blindly signing it means exactly what is on that sheet of paper, that the provider settles on an amount, and you are accepting an obligation to repay it. Redlining and setting a ceiling on what you're willing/able to pay shows good faith. Which if it comes to a court case, goes a long way.
https://obamacarefacts.com/health-insurance/out-of-pocket-ma...
Now keep in mind, as mentioned earlier, if you go to an out-of-network provider, and get billed for the balance of what that provider charges and your insurance won't cover, that is now between you and the provider because the insurance claim is technically complete.
This is why in some cases you may want to redline the financial responsibility statement and specify you will pay up to a set amount over what your insurer disburses. Technically, the provider can come back and grumble, but if you absolutely cannot afford to get nailed with a notorious "surprise" medical bill, that's a much more "good faith" way to approach the transaction.
It sucks... I know.
That's how a society is supposed to work: you don't leave people to suffer because they aren't rich.
Why do we do it for health care or health care insurance? If the justification is "everyone needs it and you will die without it" then shouldn't farms and supermarkets also be public utilities? The line seems entirely arbitrary to me. Water yes, but food no? Why education and healthcare? Why not heating and electric power?
The added benefit of letting people arrange it individually is that those with a higher risk appetite are not forced into it (at significant personal expense) against their will/consent, too.
We certainly do: taxes fund social programs like welfare and subsidies, which allow every member of society to afford a baseline level of food, housing and transportation.
Back in World War II, food supplies were rationed precisely because everyone needs them, so food vendors have certainly faced regulation in times of scarcity. Farmers still receive sizable EU and US subsidies. [1] [2]
In the US, the government purchased bulk amounts of foods for decades. [3]
[1] https://farmsubsidy.org/
[2] https://farm.ewg.org/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese
We don't buy bulk food because it's a commodity with low entry costs, and between subsidies and SNAP we can keep food almost universally available. We should be doing more, because people do fall through the gaps and our agriculture subsidies could be better directed.
We subsidize transportation and oil to keep costs down. We should do more to expand free at the point of access mass transit.
There are means-tested programs for cell phones paid entirely by tye federal government (you may hear them coloquially referred to as "Obamaphones").
Many people believe basic, low cost banking services should be provided through the USPS. I believe Senator Elizabeth Warren is an advocate for this policy.
> Why do we do it for health care or health care insurance?
Health care and health insurance are different from the other examples you listed. If a person is in dire need of care, they are unlikely to be able to shop around. They might not even be in a condition to prove they are able to pay, so we require hospitals to treat people without waiting for such proof, which means providers can take on significant losses which need to be covered.
And to keep costs down in such a system where you cover these cases, it makes sense to invest in preventative care, up to the point of paying people to get it.
Entry costs to starting a hospital or becoming a health care professional are high because people want some standard of safety. This lumits competition that makes your other examples work.
> Water yes, but food no? Why education and healthcare? Why not heating and electric power?
Yes to all of the above. Since you added heating and electric, often low income will qualify someone for assistance, eapecially heating in colder regions. Since the market functions well enough for people with sone money, means testing seems to work well enough here.
> The added benefit of letting people arrange it individually is that those with a higher risk appetite are not forced into it (at significant personal expense) against their will/consent, too.
The challenge is that if you make people arrange it individually, there is incentive to underestimate the risk (higher risk means higher premiums) and then they might need care that they cannot afford. The health care system sometimes still incurs this cost because they might have to provide emergency treatment (and many conditions untreated due to costs can become emergencies).
DED-INN/OON
Me: $7k/$35k
Fam: $14k/$70k
OOP Max-INN/OON
Me: $7k/no max
Fam: $14k/no max
I regret leaving my grandfathered plan from 2010 - every year I got a threat saying it would be gone next year, then magically one more 'extension' with a threat that it would be gone next year again. And the price kept going up. Switched to ACA plan and... I missed this 'no max' stuff. Fingers crossed I don't need healthcare if I'm ... you know, outside whatever 'network' might happen to take me in for care.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm currently looking into ACA plans and would rather not go bankrupt...
I hate medical billing to the point I dove in to try to figure out how it all works.
Can you tell?
In California it is nearly impossible to find therapy or similar services that don’t charge much more than the per service maximums allowed by Anthem Blue Cross (and likely others).
This is primarily about out-of-network care, but good luck finding a competent therapist in-network in the Bay Area.
For example, the max paid for a therapy visit might be $120 while the providers typically charge $160-180/session.
On my plan, out-of-network providers were supposed to be 70% covered but I only learned after the fact that coverage was 70% up to the plan max for the stated service.
How was one to know the plan max per service? Therein lies the trick, they won’t tell you until you are on the plan and even then you cannot simply ask for a list of limits by service. You have to ask one by one after you have already committed to the plan.
The plan providers do not proactively disclose even the existence of these per service limits during open enrollment, and certainly not the detailed limits.
The plan providers continue to do this year after year despite knowing full well that their limits are well below market rates. As a result predicting out of pocket costs for therapy or other mental health services is next to impossible.
It feels fraudulent and deceptive even though I suspect they have excellent lawyers who keep them coloring just inside the lines so as not to get sued.
Still, I sometimes wonder if a class-action lawsuit might be the best solution.
> For example, the max paid for a therapy visit might be $120 while the providers typically charge $160-180/session.
These seem tightly (and unsurprisingly) linked. If you were competent at your job and had a choice to bill $120/hr or $160/hr, which would you choose?
If you weren’t competent, having a steady stream of $120/hr customers pipelined to you would be mighty convenient as well.
What that meant was if you had advanced needs you ended up paying out of pocket a lot.
This is the real problem. If we could solve that, none of the rest would be an issue.
Are you serious? Is this a real act? We need an act of congress to not be surprised by health care?
I see a trend!
Similar adjustments?
Can't count how many times this kind of thing has worked.
"We will start using Google Classroom for all communication, class materials, lesson videos, live meetings, and grades"
Sure. Good. Come grade time:
"Your child is missing a lot of work. It's all due in a week."
Kid, you have to do x,y,z missing assignments listed on Google Classroom.
"Your child has already completed x."
It was marked missing on Google Classroom.
"Please refer to Infinite Campus to see which assignments are missing."
Ok...I signed up for Infinite Campus, and I don't see anything.
"Did you use the user/pass we automatically created for each parent?"
What? No.
"Sir, we sent out this information weeks ago."
Search...search...manual search...I don't see it on Google Classroom.
"Oh, we sent it through ClassDojo."
---
This is very simplified. Google Classroom required teacher-provided codes to join "classes" for each subject, provided through...school email! School email is an unused morass for Google Classroom notification emails for every action your child or their teacher makes. Get a teacher message on ClassDojo? Sorry, can't tell if it was a mass message or directed at you, so you have to clarify whether it applies to your kid given their IEP. Got two parents using Dojo? Sorry, can't see if the other parent has already responded to a teacher message. Completed an assignment on Classroom but didn't click "Turn in"? Missing. Can't find where to enter answers? Oops, your child knows to use ImagineMathExploreLinkConnect to get to that material. Completed on that fourth-party platform, but didn't go back to Classroom to click "Turn in?" Missing. Triple checked everything but still a bunch of missing assignments in Infinite Campus? Teacher is behind on grading, and there's no way to know that, either from Infinite Campus or Google Classroom, but it was in the class newsletter we emailed to your child.
Maybe not all employers, but at least mine does not realize quite how much further parents fell behind that year than those without school-age kids, on balance.
When schools excitedly announce a new platform for learning anything, I want to punch myself in the face.
My son is the same. He started kindergarten completely comfortable with negative numbers (we just always drew the number line with both positive and negative parts) and basic algebra and only was allowed to test to enter the gifted program in third grade.
They are finally doing algebra again now that he is in fourth grade (they do math grades 3 and 4 in third grade and 5 and 6th grade math in 4th grade) but if we hadn’t set him up with a tutor a couple of years ago he’d have given up on school completely.
My younger son in 1st grade has autism (and is also gifted), to the point that he is legally supposed to have a permanent paraeducator with him at all times to help him cope with classes and physically help him if he needs help with basic tasks like holding his pencil, or realizing that he is frustrated and can’t communicate that.
Covid meant no paraeducator. Oh, they had one on the payroll, of course, but they were virtual. So the person who was supposed to help my son hold a pencil and detect he was frustrated and so on, was just a person on a zoom call.
My son lost almost a year of learning because of covid. It would have been more but we sued the school district to demand they at least put a plan in place and miraculously the day they were served with the papers, they told us “oh, we were just about to have a solution for you” and miraculously the same week, he was back in school with his para helping him with the virtual lessons.
My youngest daughter started kindergarten during covid. Everything was online. Her assignments were all in class dojo or maybe google classroom. All of the assignments had written instructions for her to follow. She was just starting Kindergarten and couldn’t exactly read well enough to follow the instructions.
All of this mean my wife and I basically spent all day as full-time teachers aides, because the kids couldn’t be left for even a few minutes by themselves. This is a difficult thing to do when also working full time.
Covid especially sucked for families with young special needs children. I think these kids were done a huge disservice.
All I can say is I'm glad we are all back in-person. The full-time dual-career parents as teacher's aides life was a fever dream of nearly snapping daily.
As a final anecdote: our kids had a full-time gym teacher. They were supposed to have “gym” lessons three times a week.
For the entirety of covid, their “lesson” was a single powerpoint slide with the words “go play” on it.
That was the entirety of the work that needed to be done by the gym teacher for a year - post that one slide to google classroom at the appropriate times.
In California, this shouldn't happen. If you go to an in-network hospital, all care providers you see are required to bill you at the in-network rate.
Never happened. They never pick up the phone, and they don't have any other way to contact them after you applied for benefits. I tried for weeks to resolve an issue with an application for my father, a dozen of calls, every time being on hold for hours. Sometimes the automated system says "leave your number and someone will call you back tomorrow at a certain time". That's a lie, no one has ever called back.
That seems a very strange conclusion to me. Health care in the US is a mess right now, public or private, largely because of the mess caused by extreme privatization. Half of the problems people have with health care would vanish overnight if we had universal health coverage.
Me: logging in to My Government using DigiD, which takes some effort, like five steps between two different sites and an app, but at least seems to be secure.
My Government message: you have a message from <organization>. Log in to <organization> portal to view message.
Me: Logging in to <organization> portal, again using DigiD (same steps).
<organization> portal message: There is a new document for you to download at My Documents in our portal.
Me: Wow, I don't even have to log in again, that's great! Document is not in the list, though. O, you have to select unread documents, otherwise you only get the old ones. Sure, makes sense.
Document: You student loan interest has been changed. We will send you your new monthly repayment amount soon.
Me: Great, glad I spent an hour finding out what was in that document...
like any market, there are competently run companies and there are terrible ones (e.g. HSBC)
You're just gonna leave us hanging like that?
sorry :)
Otherwise, this was a completely wasted/pointless use of electrons.
Credit Unions are usually hyper-local or for special interest groups so you'd need to look around by you.
The only downside that I've run into is that they don't have branches that take cash deposits.
At a certain size you just become too big to be competent, and the incentives get FUBAR. After that they don't really care about customer satisfaction because they're really focused on investors or the next 1mm corporate customers.
Of course, we're talking about thousands of small institutions, they're going to vary wildly.
First of all, the system operates on a complaint basis - they're not interested in being handed evidence of GDPR breaches, they're only "interested" (in quotes because the entire process feels like they're being forced to do something and do the bare minimum, as opposed to genuinely caring about protecting & defending citizens' privacy) in complaints where you didn't get your way. Imagine if the police wasn't interested in the location of a wanted, violent criminal and turned people away with "come back when you've actually been shot by him".
The complaints process puts the burden of investigating, documenting the breach and verifying further compliance onto you. It is extremely admin-heavy and requires you to first argue with the company and give them 30 days (more in certain specific scenarios) to respond, so a malicious actor can drag out the process for months before you can even proceed with a complaint to the regulator, and once the regulator takes action it is up to you to assess whether they now comply, and if not, go through the whole process again.
Finally, if you've made it through thus far and actually have a valid complaint that doesn't give these lazy idiots a technicality to use as an excuse to close your complaint, it'll rot in a queue for months, and when it actually gets processed and actioned, the only outcomes I've had so far (including for a company clearly acting in bad faith and probably breaking more laws than just the GDPR) is the ICO sending a letter which the company can ignore in total impunity, with the real-world penalty for ignoring it being another letter.
Imposing such a "penalty" obviously requires going through this whole process again so in the real-world very few people will make it this far to begin with, let alone following up on further non-compliance.
I'm also doubtful of their technical proficiency so I'm afraid they can trivially be defeated by the company using some technobabble to justify why they can't delete accounts if there's no expert on hand to debunk the BS excuses.
It is a war of attrition in which the regulator (at least in the UK) is in cahoots with the enemy.
The sorts of companies that don't have an online mechanism to delete your account are the same kinds of companies that have never heard of, or don't care about the the GDPR.
I've always wondered whether GDPR just closed their eyes on that, or if it was so that the process of later restoring data was flagrant enough that it would be hard to hide upon inspection...
you: if I don’t give you a good rating in this survey will you get fired?
customer service agent: yes”
This particular aspect of modern society really bothers me
I'm not one of those of those though. I like my CS people to be able to do their jobs to keep the inevitable discruption to a customer's day minimized.
In the place I'm at, my Call Center is one of the happiest groups in the company. So many other places I've been that wasn't the case, do I made damn sure to deliver the best impl possible when I got the chance to oversee it.
To get your metrics right, you don't want your queues doing weird things, because it's hard enough making sure you have enough bodies to keep the queue times short enough your customers will even bother.
I put particular emphasis on getting my Call Center people exactly what they need to do their jobs quickly, because I don't see them as sunk cost, but an incestment in customer goodwill. Present a good face to the public, and be able to handle their problems, and they will either stick around or come back.
It's an interesting piece of technology to set up and QA. The meeting of telephony and Internet is a section of tech I like to dabble in, because phones are cool.
On the occasions where I get assigned a clown, I have no problem giving the appropriate rating there either.
However:
(1) Most of the times, the problem does not get solved, requiring follow ups, but the surveys do not allow for marking that. This allows the representatives to set the problem aside without resulting in negative feedback for them.
(2) Many times, the representatives are helpless in solving the problem which has its roots in company's policies. (E.g., deletion of older digital statements in the OP). Giving a poor rating to the representative would not solve the real problem.
Both of the above can be fixed by having more options in the survey, but they don't include them.
All systems have their limits, but the current electronic ones are much better than the mortar and paper of yesteryear. I just finished renewing tags for my cars in 5 minutes from the comfort of my home, as compared to 2 hour Tag Office visit 20 years ago. (Happy bday to me!).
Actually with more steps.
Paper statements:
Bank generates paper statement on appointed day (work/time input by bank)
Bank packages paper statement in envelope and mails it (work/time input by bank)
Postal service delivers paper statement to my mailbox (work/time input by postal service)
I open paper statement (work/time input by me)
I scan paper statement (work/time input by me) (also can be optional if one prefers simply filing paper statements)
Electronic statement PDF's on bank website:
Bank (maybe) sends an email saying "your statement is ready"
I receive the email
I have to now open my password manager (work/time by me)
I have to log into bank website (work/time input by me)
I have to navigate to the "download your statement area" (which was designed to make the process of accessing the electronic statement as obtuse as possible) (work/time input by me)
I have to download the pdf (hopefully one click for me, but still a bit of work/time by me)
I have to rename the downloaded pdf to fit my filing convention (since, at best, it downloads as "statement.pdf" from the bank)
The major time input on my part with paper statements is the "scan" part, all the rest happens without any involvement of time, energy, or remembering it is "time" on my part.
The electronic statement download requires I actively expend time and effort to "go to their website, log in, find the download section, find the statement, and initiate the download".
What I want to see, but no bank offers it, is exactly the same flow as the paper/postal service, but substituting "email" for "postal service" and "pdf" for "paper". I upload a GPG public key, bank does the work of encrypting the pdf using my key and emailing me a copy (which makes "electronic statement" the same as paper, they do the work of remembering it is time and initiating the transmission). Then I save the pdf attachment from the email, decrypt it, and file it (saving the "scan" step from the paper copy flow).
*unless the bank changes something about their email/website/pdf and that breaks the script
However, if you can develop an in-person face-to-face rapport with someone at a bank, you'll find that they can bypass, sometimes, much of the infuriating petty bureaucracy.
I once had a bank employee print almost a ream of statements on the spot for me. I was almost in tears from the generosity of their time and effort. This was after going to a different branch an being told it would cost hundreds of dollars and take weeks because it was a "back-office" job.
You never know when you might need them.
Also, ALWAYS be nice to janitors, maids, maintenance staff, front desk people, security guards, etc.
You should make anyone with access to a set of keys your friend.
Plus there's a difference between "be nice" and "go the extra effort to be nice". You can be perfectly friendly and nice and you can strike up some chit-chat and develop a low-key "relationship" with someone.
Stockholm Syndrome. Tears of gratitude for a bank employee paid for their time and effort bypassing standard procedure says more than the article.
I knew that I needed someone to cut through bullshit red-tape for me. The first branch didn't do it, so I went to another and was lucky enough to find someone who wasn't a rule-following robot.