We’ve learned a lot about Century in the short time we’ve been doing business with them. I wanted to post this “scorecard” of our interactions thus far, for the benefit of anyone who might be considering patronizing them or comparing them to other banks in the area.

Executive summary: So far, I like Century and I’m happy with the switch. I have my complaints, but the positives outweigh the negatives in my mind, especially since there are some things I like a lot.

Everyone with whom we’ve dealt at Century has been consistently helpful and responsive. The process of applying for our new HELOC was painless; the bank visit to sign all the HELOC paperwork and open the checking account was also quite painless; there were no application or closing fees; and unlike our old Citizens HELOC, the Century one does not have an annual fee. Advantage: Century

The names of the managers of every Century branch are posted on their web site. Not only that, but so are their email addresses. Not only that, but they actually respond, and promptly, when you send them email (well, at least, the manager of my branch does). Not only that, but the email addresses of the Chairman, President/CEO, and Executive Vice President are also posted on their web site. Just try to get the email address of someone at Citizens with the authority to help you solve a problem! Advantage: Century

Century’s telephone customer service department is open 7am-7pm Monday through Friday and 8am-1pm Saturday. Citizens, on the other hand, has agents available 24×7. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. When you speak to someone at Century, you’re speaking to someone at Century, not some outsourced customer service center full of poorly trained agents with foreign accents so heavy they are often impossible to understand. I definitely prefer good customer service with reasonable hours over bad customer service with 24×7 hours. Advantage: Century

Not only that, but when you send Century a message through their online banking system, you often get an answer back the same day. Again, the person answering you actually works for Century, in Massachusetts. The reply includes the full name of the person who sent it, and the reply notification you get from the online banking system includes his or her email address. Advantage: Century

Century is a much smaller bank than Citizens, so it has far fewer branches and ATMs (Century: 24 branches, 28 ATMs; Citizens: >1,480 branches, >3,800 ATMs). However, Century is a member of the fee-free SUM ATM network of over 5,300 ATMs, unlike Citizens, which used to be in SUM but backed out at the end of 2009. Furthermore, there are Century branches near our home in Allston, Newton and Brookline, and there are two branches within a few minutes’ walk from my office. Also, Century allows several foreign ATM transactions per month at no charge (although the owner of the ATM may charge their own fee). Access to the bank is not going to be a problem. Advantage: tie

When you open a Century checking account, your first box of checks is free, but after that you have to pay for them. All our checks were free from Citizens, since our HELOC balance was large enough to qualify us for “Citizens Gold” status. However, the Citizens annual HELOC fee (see above) cost us more than paying for checks at Century is going to, so… Advantage: Century

UPDATE [August 23, 2011]: Our checks hadn’t arrived as of yesterday, 19 days after we opened our account. I called Century to find out why, and the customer service representative at Century conferenced in the check printer, Deluxe, to check on the order status. Deluxe had no record of anyone having ordered our checks, so the Century rep went ahead and ordered a box while I was on the phone. She was friendly and helpful, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the interaction, for three reasons:

1. She was mildly apologetic, but frankly, when you open a checking account and the bank fails to order checks as promised, abject apology is called for.
2. The Deluxe rep asked whether standard shipping was OK, and the Century rep asked me if it was. I said, “No, of course not. I’ve already waited 19 days for my checks because the bank forgot to order them. It should be a rush order and the bank should pay for overnight shipping.” I really shouldn’t have had to be the one to ask for this.
3. After I said I expected a rush order with overnight shipping, the Century rep told me that she’d email the bank manager and let her know what happened, and the manager would “probably” agree to cover the additional cost, but she couldn’t say for certain. That is totally not OK. Of course the bank needs to cover the cost of fixing their error as quickly as possible; this should not have been up for discussion.

This clearly calls for one point off from Century. UPDATE 2 [August 23, 2011]: The assistant manager at our branch (the manager is on vacation) has confirmed that the bank will cover the cost of the rush order and overnight shipping, and furthermore offered to cover the cost of our next check order as well, to make up for the inconvenience.

After we opened our account at Century, they mailed us a pamphlet encouraging us to use our Century ATM/debit card like a credit card. The pamphlet claimed that it was “safer” and “more secure” to use the card to make purchases without a PIN, a claim that is in my opinion quite bogus. Also, the pamphlet made no effort to explain the risks and disadvantages of a checking account debit card vs. a traditional credit card.

I don’t know whether Citizens also makes the bogus claim that PINless debit card transactions are safer, but they definitely encourage their customers to do PINless transactions. Both Century and Citizens are doing this for the same reason: the bank makes a higher transaction fee when you use your card as a debit card than they do when you use it as an ATM card. I’d like to see Century be more up-front and transparent about the risks that are inherent in debit cards whether a PIN is used or not, but alas they’re not really any worse than Citizens or any other bank nowadays, so… Advantage: tie

(By the way, it is exactly because of those risks that my wife and ordered ATM-only cards, not debit cards, from both Century and Citizens.)

I sent the manager of my Century branch an email message complaining about the pamphlet. She responded a half hour later to let me know that she was passing on my message to the appropriate people. A day and a half later, I received a detailed response from Century’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Sales & Marketing. Although I don’t entirely agree with his response, the fact that a bank Senior Vice President responded to my complaint, by email, a day and a half after I sent it, is simply incredible. Advantage: Century

Century’s online banking application is simply awful. The UI looks like it hasn’t been updated in a decade, or if it has, certainly not by someone who has any current UI design knowledge. The Citizens online banking UI isn’t great either, but it’s unarguably better than Century’s. Advantage: Citizens

Furthermore, Century’s online banking has some significant functional deficiencies. The ones I’ve identified so far are:

• Passwords are limited to 8 characters (Citizens allows up to 15).
• Passwords are limited to letters and numbers, no special characters (but the same is true of Citizens).
• I’ve heard, but of course cannot yet confirm given the age of our account, that account transaction data is only available on the web site for the past six months.
• The “message center” does not save copies of messages you send to the bank, so once you send a message, you have no record of having done so until/unless the bank responds, which they are pretty reliable about doing, but still. Citizens and the credit-card account management sites I’ve used all save copies of sent messages.
• Money cannot be withdrawn through online banking from our HELOC into our checking account (Citizens allows instant transfers from a HELOC into a checking account).

Advantage: Citizens

Aside from the 8-character limit on online banking passwords, Century seems pretty serious about online banking security. Two examples:

1. According to their web site, ”After three failed attempts to access an Internet Banking session, the Internet Banking account is locked out for 24 hours and the bank is alerted. This deters any person trying to guess your PIN.”
2. The morning after I registered my online banking account, I made a bill payment online through my laptop tethered to my iPhone’s personal WiFi hotspot on the bus on the way to work. Within a couple of hours, I’d received both a voicemail message and an email message asking me to call the bank to verify my online banking activity. They told me that the combination of a recently created online banking account, access to the account from a new IP address, and the fact that the IP address was from a mobile device, was sufficiently suspicious that they needed to contact me to make sure it was OK.

UPDATE [August 25, 2011]:

However, I’ve found an unfortunate and disturbing kink in Century’s security armor. If you visit their web site, click on the Contact Us link, click on Opt out of Bounce Protection, and then click on the “OPT OUT” button to get to a web page you can use to opt out of bounce protection, this warning pops up:

As a reminder, you are about to send information over the Internet. It might be possible for others to see what you are sending. If you prefer, you may call us at 866.8.CENTURY to process this request.

And, indeed, if you examine the opt-out page, you will see that it requires you to enter your email address, name, address, telephone numbers, and account number, and that these data are then transmitted over the internet, unencrypted. Um, wow. No, Century Bank security folks, it’s not OK to ask your customers to enter sensitive information into a web form that’s transmitted in clear-text, even if you warn them about it. They don’t understand why it’s a bad idea, so the warning doesn’t do any good. Understanding why it’s a bad idea is your job.

When I first wrote this blog entry, I gave Century a point for the impressive security precautions enumerated above. However, the unencrypted opt-out page offsets that point, so I’ve taken it away.

After my wife and I received our Century ATM cards and PINs in the mail (separately, on different days; good for Century for getting that right!), we wanted to change our PINs from the ones issued by Century. The mailing containing the PIN did not say how to change it. I found this page on Century’s web site which tipped me off that I might be able to change our PINs through the automated telephone banking system, but there were no details about how to do this. It turns out that if you call and navigate into the telephone menu tree pretending that you want to “activate” your ATM card, when you get several levels into the tree you’ll discover that there’s an option hidden alongside “activation” to change your PIN. It really shouldn’t be that hard. Here’s the funny thing, though… I couldn’t find anything on the Citizens web site about changing my PIN, nor could I figure out how to do it through their automated telephone banking system. So as bad as Century is about this, Citizens is apparently worse. Advantage: Century

When we opened our checking account, we would told that any checks we deposited in the first 30 days would be held for 7 days before the funds would be available for us to use. I have three complaints about this:

• In fact, the hold was 7 business days, i.e., 9 calendar days. It would have have been better if the staff of our branch had told us this rather than incorrectly telling us “7 days.”
• We just opened a HELOC, so the bank has checked our backgrounds extensively and knows that we have excellent credit ratings going back over 20 years. They’ve just paid off our old Citizens HELOC, whose balance was in six figures. It’s ridiculous that they trust us enough to do that but still feel compelled to put a hold on our deposited checks.
• Several of the checks we deposited were written against our own Citizens checking account to transfer money from there into our new Century account. Century could have picked up the phone and called Citizens in a matter of minutes to verify the availability of funds to cover those checks. A 9-day wait was hardly necessary or reasonable.

Our Century checking account doesn’t earn any interest. On the one hand this doesn’t really matter all that much since we weren’t earning more than a few dollars of interest each year on our Citizens account (any extra money we have each month goes straight toward paying down our HELOC balance!). However, why we were earning interest on our Citizens account but not our Century account puts Century at a slight disadvantage.

Citizens combined our HELOC and checking account balances and determined that they were high enough together to make us “Citizens Gold” customers, which allowed us to sign up for an interest-bearing checking account without paying any fees. In contrast, Century does not count HELOC balances when aggregating accounts to determine fee waiver eligibility. Advantage: Citizens

UPDATE [September 20, 2011]: It’s inconceivable that the president and CEO of Citizens Bank would read and comment on a blog posting about his bank, but that’s just what Century Bank President and CEO Barry Sloane did below. Mr. Sloane, thank you very much for visiting my blog. Your visit reinforces my conviction that Century actually cares about its customers, so I’m giving you another point.

Final score:

In the meantime, however, I have yet another bit of Citizens Bank lunacy to report.

While transitioning from our Citizens checking account to our Century account, I canceled a number of online bill payments on the Citizens Bank web site and recreated those payments from my Century account. One of those canceled payments was my monthly payment to my Citizens MasterCard.

The Citizens Bank web site actually shows my MasterCard account as one of my Citizens Bank accounts, so theoretically I could make payments by using the “Transfers” tab on the web site instead of the “Pay Bills” tab. However, because I don’t entirely trust the bank not to screw up such transfers for reasons which aren’t worth going into here, and for consistency with all my other monthly payments, I usually pay the credit card through “Pay Bills”, and that has always worked fine in the past.

It turns out that the Citizens Bank web site is “smart” about payments to a Citizens Bank card scheduled through “Pay Bills”. Although the payment shows up in the bill payment section of the web site, in the back end it is handled as a transfer.

How do I know this? Because although the web site gets this right when you create such a payment, it apparently gets it wrong when you cancel one. The payment disappears from your list of pending payments, but this is left behind in your list of pending transfers:

(click for full-size image)

If this were a normal transfer, there would be links under “Edit” and “Delete” which I could click to edit or delete it. But this transfer isn’t normal… it was created automatically by the web site’s back-end code, and so I can’t do anything about it.

I obviously don’t want my credit card bill to be paid twice, so I need to make this transfer go away. So I sent Citizens Bank this message through their web site:

I canceled this payment and it should not be showing up as a pending transfer. There’s no button for me to cancel it, so something is clearly wrong. THERE WILL NOT BE ENOUGH MONEY IN MY ACCOUNT TO COVER THIS TRANSFER ON AUGUST 16, so you’d better fix whatever program is causing this transfer to keep showing up even though I’ve canceled it!

Here’s the useless answer which I just got back from them:

Thank you for your recent email regarding a pending transfer to your credit card. Please note our records indicate this transaction was not scheduled through the online banking “Transfers” feature. In the event you have scheduled this payment through the credit card website please log in to your credit card account to cancel the transaction. You may also contact the number below for assistance.

I just sent them the following response:

I already explained this to you. Let me try again.

No, I didn’t schedule it through “Transfers”. I scheduled it through “Pay Bills”.

Your computers decided to convert the bill payment into a transfer. Then when I canceled the bill payment, your computers decide not to properly cancel the corresponding transfer that YOUR COMPUTERS CREATED.

Please don’t blow me off. THIS IS YOUR FAULT AND YOU NEED TO FIX IT.

I will be REALLY, REALLY PISSED OFF if you fail to fix this and the transfer goes through despite the fact that I canceled it and contacted you well in advance of the scheduled transfer date to notify you about the problem and ask you to fix it.

THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH YOUR COMPUTERS. Please forward this to someone who can actually do something about it. Do NOT send me another message blowing me off and telling me it’s not your fault. IT IS YOUR FAULT.

It’s bad that the QA they do on their web site is so feeble that either nobody ever tested this use case, or worse, they tested it and decided it was OK to allow this bug to make it into production. It’s even worse that their customer service staff is too stupid or poorly trained to recognize when the web site is broken and escalate the issue to someone who can do something about it.

I guess I’ll just have to make the issue moot by withdrawing all my money from the account and closing it before August 16.

You can click on the letter to see a larger version. The circled sentences may be a bit difficult to read. The first one says, “The following information is required to initiate your dispute.” The second one says, “Please complete this form immediately, as the dispute process starts upon receipt of this form.”

Angry that the bank would waste my time making me fill out a form when I’d already provided all of the necessary information, I called and complained. The woman I spoke with put me on hold for a while and then came back and told me that I didn’t actually have to fill out the form because I had already provided all the necessary information; it’s just that the computer sends the letter automatically whenever a charge is placed in dispute.

I pointed out to her that “the computer” had sent me a letter which told me I needed to do something that I did not actually need to do, and that there was no indication on the letter that I might not need to send back the form, and that I had just been made to waste my time calling up the bank to find out why I received the letter. She dismissed my complaint and made it clear that she thought I was being unreasonable to expect the bank not to tell me I needed to fill out and send back a form which in fact I did not need to fill out and send back.

What a bunch of idiots.

When you first visit the “Add/Manage Groups” page, it looks like this:

The first stupid UI decision should be obvious after a moment’s thought. Once you’ve set up your groups, you will rarely if ever create new ones, and yet they’ve put a big “Add Group” box at the top of the page, taking up precious real estate.

Here’s what it looks like when you add your first group and add a payee to it:

Can you see where this is going yet? Let me make it clearer by showing what happens when you’ve created a few more groups and added payees to them:

See it now? As you add groups and assign payees, they move to the top of the page. The list of unassigned payees is forced lower and lower until finally you have to scroll just to get to it, and you have to scroll lower and lower as you assign each one.

This is by far the stupidest UI I’ve seen in quite a long time. It wasn’t uncommon to see stuff like this 10 or 15 years ago when the Web was in its infancy, but it’s difficult to imagine how something like this could end up being designed, implemented, and released by a large corporation like Citizens Bank, which presumably has the money to pay for decent UI engineers and people who know how to do usability testing.

Oh, and by the way, when you click on the “Delete Group” link for a group, it’s just gone, with no confirmation. Sheesh!

In response, the customer service representative told me the following:

• The fee for withdrawing currency from an ATM in Israel is 2%.
• The fee for exchanging currency at a bank branch is waived because I am a “Citizens Gold” customer, so this is cheaper than using an ATM in Israel.

Unfortunately all of this is incorrect:

• The fee for withdrawing currency from an ATM in Israel is actually 3%, not 2%.
• While the “exchange fee” is indeed waived for Citizens Gold customers, the bank charges a hidden fee by marking up the exchange rate by around 10%, so in fact exchanging currency at a bank branch costs 7% more, and is thus 233% more expensive, than using an ATM.

Relying on the misinformation, we exchanged $3,200 worth of sheqels. In addition, based on the misinformation that the ATM fee was 2%, we made thousands of dollars in ATM withdrawals for purchases in Israel which would have been cheaper if we had used our credit card (3% fee – 1% cash back = 2% net cost). In total, the wrong information provided to us by Citizens Bank’s customer service department cost us a little over $300 in unnecessary fees.

Aside from the telephone customer service representative, I dealt with several tellers at the branch where I did the exchanges. I mentioned to them that I was exchanging a lot of cash in Boston because I was told that it was the cheapest way to get sheqels from dollars. None of them felt it appropriate to point out that using an ATM in Israel would be cheaper.

When I discovered that I had been ripped off on the exchanges done in Boston, I sent a letter to the branch manager demanding a refund of the excess fees. He never responded.

When I later discovered that I had been misinformed about the ATM fee as well, I sent a second letter, this one to Stephen Woods, the Massachusetts President of Citizens Bank, demanding a refund of all the unnecessary fees. I also informed him that the bank’s failure to correctly disclose fees constituted unfair and deceptive trade practices under M.G.L. Chapter 93a, and that my letter to him constituted a 30-day demand letter, after which, if my complaints were not addressed, I would file suit against Citizens Bank not only for the unnecessary fees, but for triple damages as permitted under Chapter 93a.

Let me take a brief intermission in the story to remind readers of the cardinal rule of good customer service:

Mistakes happen. It’s how you deal with them that distinguishes you from everybody else.

Citizens Bank was already treading on thin ice because of the branch manager’s failure to respond to my first letter. Nevertheless, a frank admission of error and prompt refund of the disputed fees at this point could still have wiped the slate clean and left me feeling like the errors really were unintentional and the bank felt remorse.

I’m sure it will not surprise you to hear that this is not what I got.

About six weeks after I sent my letter, I received a response from an “Executive Services Senior Advocate” at Citizens Bank. She said that the bank hadn’t done anything wrong. She said that it was impossible for a customer service representative to tell me the cheapest way to get sheqels out of my bank account. And she said that since I was apparently upset about having been charged fees at all for currency withdrawals in Israel, she had “as a courtesy” refunded all of the ATM fees (which was about half of the refund amount I had asked for).

I sent Ms. Advocate a second letter in which I explained that (a) she had apparently conflated my two complaints and misunderstood both of them, since I was not upset about the ATM fees per se, but rather about the fact that I was charged more than I was told I would be; (b) it is ridiculous to claim that a Citizens Bank customer service representative is incapable of telling me that 3% is cheaper than 10%; and (c) if Citizens Bank didn’t refund the rest of the fees, I would sue, and there was little doubt that I would be awarded triple damages.

Ms. Advocate then sent me a second letter, in which she acknowledged that I had been misinformed about the ATM fee (wonder of wonders! an admission of error!) and then reiterated in more detail her fantastic explanation of why the customer service representative did nothing wrong when she claimed that exchanges in Boston would be cheaper than ATM withdrawals:

“As I mentioned in my previous response, our employees would not have knowledge of what method of conversion of a particular foreign country’s currency would be least expensive for our customers since there are numerous currencies and exchange rates of these currencies that may vary daily and other financial institutions may or may not have additional fees that you would be subject to. It is the customer’s responsibility to conduct transactions that they feel are in their best interest. Our employees do not function as financial advisors nor in a fiduciary capacity and thus are not responsible for ensuring that your voluntary transactions are the most financially advantageous.

“At Citizens Bank, our rates typically cover the costs associated with handling foreign exchange transactions on behalf of our customers while maintaining a competitive market pricing structure. We periodically survey the foreign exchange market in our foot print and find that our exchange rate are indeed competitive with other institutions and exchange houses for like transactions.”

In other words, “We mark up the exchange rate as much as we can get away with, and we think it’s perfectly reasonable for our telephone customer service representatives to fail to disclose this when explicitly asked to compare the cost of in-person exchanges vs. ATM withdrawals. Oh, and by the way, our lawyers wrote these two paragraphs.”

Ms. Advocate is obviously correct that there are other factors to consider, e.g., fluctuating exchange rates and ATM fees charged by local banks in foreign countries. However, the fact that these other factors exist by no means eliminates the obligation for Citizens Bank to accurately disclose the ones under its control. To suggest otherwise is patently absurd.

Ms. Advocate then informed me that the bank had refunded (again “as a courtesy”) the rest of the money I had demanded, but that, “The credits that have been applied to your account should not be construed as an admission of any wrongdoing or error on the part of Citizens Bank.”

In other words, “What we did is sleazy, but we don’t want to admit it, and we also don’t want it to end up in court where a judge might order us to disclose to customers that we mark up the exchange rate, so we’re going to pay you off.”

If we wished to give them the benefit of the doubt, we might hypothesize that if the bank were to admit an obligation to disclose their exchange rate mark-up, it would open then up to a class-action lawsuit on behalf of everyone who has ever done a currency exchange there. The only problem with this hypothesis is that I did not complain of a failure to disclose to anyone who walks in the door, but rather of failing to disclose to someone who specifically requested disclosure, which they are surely obligated to do.

If I thought the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office might actually do something about stuff like this, I’d file a complaint with them. As it is, because this is the last (and worst) in a series of bad experiences with Citizens Bank, we have decided to move our accounts to another bank as soon as possible.

The last time I logged into the Citizens Bank online banking Web site, I saw this message:

We’ve made some improvements to Online Banking! The new “Manage Features” tab provides convenient access to services which work along with your accounts, including Goal Savings, Rewards, Overdraft Services, and Protection Services. See how you can get the most out of your accounts!

Unfortunately, there was no “Manage Features” tab that I could find anywhere on the Web site. I sent them this message through the site:

My home page says “[above message elided]” but there is no “Manage Features” tab that I can find anywhere on the site.

Two days later, I got this response:

Thank you for your recent email regarding a Manage Features tab. Please provide additional information where you are viewing this reference; please provide page. Unfortunately we are unable to assist you further with this issue with the information provided, as we are unable to locate the page you are viewing. You may choose to call when you are on the website so we can navigate along with you. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.

Which part of “home page” did they not understand? Which part of “It’s your broken Web site that displayed this stupid message, so why don’t you go bother the people who create and post these messages instead of wasting my time?” did they not understand?

*sigh*

Lawrence Fish
Executive Chairman
RBS Citizens, N.A.
1 Citizens Plaza
Providence, RI 02903-1344

Dear Mr. Fish,

Please find enclosed a complaint about your institution which I just filed with the office of the Attorney General of Massachusetts.

You promised me a $50 promotional credit and then never paid it. I spent almost 25 minutes on the phone with your customer service department today trying to get this resolved, only to be told at the end that it would be “researched” and it might take another two months before I am paid what I am owed, if indeed I am paid at all.

When I asked for this to be confirmed in writing, the representative with whom I was speaking said this was not possible. I had to escalate to a supervisor, Ana, who assured me that I would receive a confirmation letter within 7-10 days. Why I had to escalate to a supervisor just to receive such a letter is beyond me. It remains to be seen whether I will actually receive the letter I was promised, or for that matter the $50.

I would like to know what you are going to do to ensure that every single person who was entitled to the $50 promotional credit receives it. Promising a promotional credit which you then fail to pay is unfair, deceptive, and fraudulent. Are you going to let that stand or take steps to remedy it?

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

encl: copy of complaint to Massachusetts Attorney General

Bye-bye, SUM Network

Citizens has withdrawn from the SUM ATM Network, effective January 1, 2010.  According to the scuttlebutt on-line, the only reason they joined SUM in the first place was because they were required to do so as condition of acquiring another bank.  Apparently that requirement was time-limited and has expired.  They’ve decided that the smaller banks were benefiting from access to Citizens ATMs a lot more than Citizens was benefiting from access to theirs, so customer convenience be damned, SUM had to go.  Not to mention that now Citizens can make money charging ATM fees to customers of those other banks.

Which brings us to our next item…

Inadequate notification of the SUM Network change

In the good old days of paper, when a bank had something important to notify their customers about, they either enclosed the notice on a separate piece of paper with monthly statements or sent a completely separate mailing.

So, what’s the equivalent in the age of paperless statements and as few postal mailings as possible to save money and protect the environment?  Well, they could:

• send customers an email message notifying them about the change (they already have the email address of everyone subscribed to paperless statements, and they already use these email addresses for marketing and important customer communication); or
• put the notification at the front of customers’ paperless statements, so when they open the PDF it’s the first thing they see (in fact, they did exactly this in this month’s statements with a fluff notice about “great eco-friendly prizes” that paperless statement users are eligible to win).

Citizens didn’t use either of these to notify people about their withdrawal from the SUM Network.  Instead, they buried the notice in the fine print at the end of people’s last 2009 statements, after all of the transaction data (i.e., where people stop reading once they have balanced their checkbook for the month), at the end of a long bullet point which started out, “This is a reminder of how you can use your debit card or ATM card,” amidst the marketing drivel which normally appears in this section of the statement which is why nobody ever reads it.

Which brings us to…

Pissing off a profitable customer over a $2 fee

A few weeks ago, I got nailed with a $2 ATM fee at a SUM ATM.  I had no idea that Citizens had withdrawn from SUM (see above), so I assumed that the fee notice was an error and figured I’d straighten it out later with Citizens since I didn’t have time to find another ATM to use.

When I got home, I looked into the matter and discovered that Citizens was no longer in SUM.  I sent Citizens a message through their online banking Web site complaining that their notification of the change was inadequate and asking them to therefore refund the $2 fee.

They sent me back a form letter notifying me that Citizens was no longer a member of the SUM Network.  Well yeah, duh, I knew that already.

I sent them back an impatient response, reiterating my complaint over inadequate notification, demanding again that they reimburse me, and ending with, “Your bank makes thousands of dollars from the interest I pay on my home equity line.  It would be foolish for you to further antagonize me over a $2 fee.”

They sent back a response again refusing to refund the fee, since it was charged by the other bank and the ATM had warned me about it.  Well, yeah, duh, I had already told them that the fee was charged by the other bank and the ATM had warned me about it.

I responded, “Your reply is callous, stupid, inadequate, and unacceptable.  Please give me the fax number of your executive complaints office so that I may let them know just how I feel about the way you have handled my complaint.”

They responded:

Thank you for your recent inquiry regarding the charge to your account. Citizens Bank is aware that situations may occur that are beyond your control. In such cases, we are able to issue a one time credit to your account. I have initiated a $2.00 rebate to your account.

They did not provide me with the contact information I requested for their complaints office.  I wrote back to them, thanked them for the credit, and again asked how I could contact their complaints office.

I got a voicemail message a few days later from a supervisor at Citizens.  I haven’t spoken to him yet.  I’m planning on getting his fax number or email address and sending him a copy of this blog posting.

Here’s a clue, Citizens Bank: it’s stupid to nickel-and-dime a customer from whom you’re making thousands of dollars per year.  When such a customer fields aggrieved over a measly $2 fee, and his complaint is even just a little bit legitimate, you refund the fee.  It shows that you care.  Conversely, arguing with the customer shows that you don’t care.

Web site silently enforces message length limits and erases customer messages

While I was going back and forth with Citizens on their Web site about the issue described above, I ran into an incredibly stupid functionality issue on their Web site combined with an incredibly annoying data-loss bug.

The “message center” on the Citizens Web site has a message length limit.  The limit is completely undocumented, i.e., when you’re composing a message, the site doesn’t tell you how long it’s allowed to be, which is the minimum acceptable behavior if you’re going to impose such a limit (the limit is also unreasonably low, but that’s a different story).  Far superior to that would be what so many other Web sites have figured out how to do: a character counter which goes down as you type and prevents you from putting more text than you’re allowed to into your message.

When you exceed the limit and try to submit your message, you get an error message saying that your message is too long and you should hit the Back button and try again.

When you hit the Back button, your message is gone.  You’ve just spent a significant amount of time composing a message (obviously, since it’s long enough to run afoul of the length limit), and the Web site just throws it away, and you’ve got to write the whole thing over again, all the while trying to guess what the limit is that you’re not allowed to exceed, because the site doesn’t tell you (even the error message doesn’t actually say what the length is; it just says that you’ve exceeded it).

Customer service staff has no clue about how to deal with Web site feedback

I sent a message to Citizens through their message center outlining the problems above.  In return, I expected an acknowledgment that the issues I described were real and an indication that my feedback had been passed on to the people who maintain the Web site.  Instead, I got back a form letter: “Please keep in mind, the length of emails is limited.”  Well, yeah, duh, isn’t that what I was complaining about?

I wrote back and told them, again, to please give me the contact information of someone to whom I could complain about their poor customer service.  This was all going on at the same time as the other issue outlined above, so I think the supervisor who called me was calling about both issues.

The great thing about paper statements is that they don’t experience technical difficulties

I’m all for the idea of saving money and protecting the environment by reducing paper mailings.  If I weren’t, I wouldn’t have invested many hours of my time in eliminating junk mail from my mailbox.  So when Citizens finally offered me the chance to switch to paperless statements for my home equity line, I took them up on it.

But here’s the thing, Citizens… When you ask your customers to switch from mailings to paperless statements, you are making a commitment to them: the statements will be available on-line when they are needed.

I’m a busy man.  I handle my financial affairs, things like reconciling my monthly bank statements, in dribs and drabs whenever I can find a few minutes to spare.  When I find those minutes, the “paper”work needs to be at my fingertips.

But it’s not.  For several days now, my home equity line statements have been inaccessible through the Web site.  This is not the first time this has happened.  I called Citizens today to ask what was going on and was told that the issue is impacting everyone; they are working on resolving it; and they could not give me an ETA for when it will be resolved.

Note: the minimum monthly payment on a Citizens home equity line is the amount of interest accrued in the past month.  Interest accrual doesn’t show up explicitly in the transaction history on the Web site (yet another stupid bug with the site).  This means that when on-line statements are unavailable, many customers have no way of knowing how much they’re required to pay that month.  Awesome!

I’ve managed high-availability OLTP Web sites.  It is not hard for such a site to serve up a bunch of PDFs; in fact, it should be trivial, since they are static documents, not database-backed queries or transactions.  It is mind-boggling that this keeps happening, mind-boggling that it takes days to resolve each time it does, and mind-boggling that whatever the problem is, Citizens didn’t just fix it properly the first time rather than letting it happen over and over.

This morning, when I attempted to log in, here’s what I experienced:

• 30 seconds to load the initial login page
• 72 seconds to load the identity verification page (i.e., “you’re using a computer without one of our cookies already in its browser cache, so you need to answer one of your security questions”)
• 57 seconds to load the password entry page
• 95 seconds to load the home screen, and several page elements were missing when it finished loading

Total: four minutes and fourteen seconds to log into a broken site

Afterwards, I tested from two other independent internet connections and saw similar results.

Some upgrade, eh?

I’m sure they’ll eventually figure out what’s wrong and fix it, but still, haven’t they ever heard of load testing?

One would hope that whoever is responsible for this debacle will be getting coal in their performance-review stockings this year.