You would think that a simple matter like mine would be easily resolved. I didn’t want to borrow money or finance an emerging nation. All I wanted to do was redeem an Israeli bond.
I’d done this before, so I knew the drill. You take the bond and a tax form to the bank’s headquarters and then go home to wait for the check to arrive by mail. This time, instead of a check, I got the bond back plus a sheaf of incomprehensible papers. I needed help, and that’s when the trouble started.
Naively I thought I could deal with the problem on the phone. My bank has a listing in the Manhattan telephone directory that takes up seven inches of fine print but doesn’t include the number for the Israeli bond department. I tried what I thought was the main number. Repeatedly. Once I let it ring 30 times. No answer. All the branches have the same number: dial in and you get an automated system that doesn’t tell you what to push for Israeli bond redemption. Unbelievably there are no listings for the executive offices, consumer complaints or customer service.
Refusing to believe that I was locked out of the fortress the bank has become I dialed every number I could coax out of the few employees I did manage to reach. To make any human contact I had to pretend! didn’t have a touch-tone phone so that, eventually, a live person would answer my calls. Hours and countless dead ends later, I got the unlisted 800 number for the Israeli bond department.
The customer-service representative I reached assured me that I didn’t have to fill out the sheaf of papers. All I had to do to expedite payment was send the bond to her office.
A week later I phoned to check the status of the “expedited” payment she had promised. I heard keys clicking as she accessed her computer flies. Bad news. My bond wasn’t “in the system,” a mantra I was to hear over and over in the weeks to come. These days not being “in the system” is the kiss of death as far as customer service is concerned. Like my bond, if your problem doesn’t show up on the screen, it doesn’t exist and can’t be found. Period. No one says “let me check further for you.” There is no further.
In general, I love automation. Making deposits and withdrawals from ATMs at any hour of the day or night is infinitely more convenient than standing in slowly moving lines at the bank. I love the fact that when paying bills at 10 p.m. I can call my bank’s service line to check my balance, determine which checks have cleared and which deposits have been credited.
But machines can’t solve problems. They can tell you whether a missing bond is “in the system” but not where else it might be or what can be done to find it. Until your problem is “in the system,” no one can do anything for you. And there’s no way around this impasse. Ask to speak to someone in authority, and you enter a twilight zone of corporate impenetrability where you cannot get a telephone number, talk to a manager, supervisor or, heaven forbid, the president of the company.
Believe me, I tried. My rep took a message but wouldn’t give me the phone number of her supervisor. I did persuade a rep at a different bank department to give me the unlisted number for Corporate Communications believing that, as a journalist, I might at least get the name and number of the head of the Israeli bond department. No such luck. I’m still waiting for a callback on that request. After three frustrating weeks, I went to my bank’s local branch and asked the assistant manager to help me reach someone who might know how to find my bond. (You think that’s what I should have done in the first place? Wait.) Incredibly, she had to phone the same 800 number I had been using and hold for customer service. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been as astonished as I was that with a bank computer sitting on her desk she couldn’t get information any more readily than I could. It got worse: “What do you mean you can’t tell me?” she expostulated when the rep she reached at first refused to reveal the name and number of the customer-service supervisor.
But serendipitously there had been a breakthrough. In the 16 hours since my last tense conversation with “my” rep, my bond had finally reached the system. The next day a check arrived, Federal Express. Coincidentally that same day I got the name and number of the head of the Israeli bond department. How? A well-connected friend phoned an attorney at the law firm that represents the bank. The cooperative lawyer called one of his contacts at the bank, who provided this otherwise top-secret information. What do you do without a well-connected friend? Beats me.
Even though I got my money, I don’t regard this as a story with a happy ending. This kind of thing happens all the time. During my banking ordeal, a friend spent one solid hour listening to canned music while waiting to speak to a live person at another bank. Someone else told about making daily calls to an 800 number halfway across the country in an effort to find out why a service center two miles from her house in New York couldn’t get a part needed to fix her dishwasher. “For months customer service told me, ‘There’s nothing on the screen’,” she reports. No, there was no appeal, no supervisor or manager to intervene on her behalf, make a call, find the part. At least she had the satisfaction of canceling her service contract! All three of us consider ourselves savvy consumers. If we have so much trouble, what happens to people who don’t have the time and determination (and, sometimes, connections) to get what they’re after?
I sent the bank’s president a bill for the work time I lost trying to penetrate his fortress. I would love to collect, but I also would like my bank, and those similar, to lower the drawbridge so we consumers can-pardon the expression-get into the system.
