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A short conversation with a bank

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231–240 of 316 posts

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that?

And surely it is different for each company?

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.

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#232
post #25
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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'?

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#233
post #45

This is very, very much the vibe of my entire experience living on this planet as an adult, dealing with financial services and tech: "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"

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 foll…

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.

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#234

> with Gmail, where you were so aggressive about mining receipt data from Amazon that when I get a receipt from Amazon now it doesn’t actually include what I bought Wow, he's right. The item name no longer appears on emailed receipts I receive from Amazon as of about late 2019 or early 2020. I can't think of a plausible explanation for this change other than preventing Google from pilfering your detailed purchase his…

Maybe this is a U.S. thing or I don’t understand what you mean by ‘receipt’ but in the U.K. I get an ‘order confirmation’ which contains the things I ordered as well as various delivery updates.

That's exactly it, except the email is just "Thank you for buying something for some price" and, no, you can't unsubscribe.

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems incompatible. Making you log-in to advertise is a far less effective option than the ability to advertise products to you while you voluntarily use another service, i.e. your email. They could easily do the same adverts and quick order links from your email, but targeted adverts in your inbox is useful information to Google, maybe even better than purchase history since the recommendation work is already comple…

Once you're logged in, the credit card is ready to go.

And if your password is stored as most people's are then an email link is really no slower.

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#236

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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…

> 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. 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…

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.

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. "…

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 pla…

Seriously.

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.

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pla…

Seriously. 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) bu…

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.

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you try all caps? Similar adjustments? Can't count how many times this kind of thing has worked.

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.

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#240
Totally missing the Etrade you must fill in this US IRS W8something form ..... finish it by uploading a copy of a recent utility bill or bank statement to verify your address ....but I live in New Zealand, we haven't had written utility bills or bank statements for years, we don't even have checks anymore, everything is paid for by bank transfer ..... but you must upload a scan of a utility bill before you can do anything .... how about a screenshot of the reminder dialog the phone company's app kicks up every month ... no it must be a scan of a paper bill .... you know our postal service stopped delivering every day because no one sends bills or checks any more right? .... paper paper paper .... so here's a vaguely doctored copy of a credit card statement I printed out so it doesn't contain anything bad ..... 10 minutes of spinning "uploading" cursor and then logged out for inactivity ... try again ... logged out again and again ... you're not really serious now are you now Etrade, you're just messing with me for the lulz ....

On to calling international to Etrade customer service, at 5am local time ..... "The call backlog is approximately 60 minutes" ..... 45 minutes in I get hung up on .... call back .... "The call backlog is approximately 90 minutes" .... 60 minutes in this time I get hung up on .....

That as my last week, how was yours?

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