American Customer Service

Or, the customer is always "on hold"

In the last two days, I've had two unsuccessful attempts at dealing with telephone customer service.

The two companies involved are Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, but I'm sure I could call just about any company's customer service number and get routed from place to place for 30 minutes or more.

I tried Bank of America yesterday because I had an online CD that just disappeared off my account listing on line and the people at the branch couldn't help since I had purchased the CD on line. I bought it on line because it had a better rate of return.

I looked on the internet and called the number they listed: 800-432-XXXX. A nice person came on the line after about a 5 minute wait. She told me that I had to call a different number, 800-622-XXXX. Another 5 + minute wait before I got a human on the line, but when I did, the woman told me (yet again) that this is not the correct number, that I should call 800-242-XXXX. I got another rep after another wait on the phone. He told me he would transfer me to another number, 877-838-XXXX, but in transferring, he cut me off, so I had to call again. Now I was starting to run late, so I waited on the line for about 5 minutes and hung up. I re-called the previous number and was told that the absolutely, positively correct phone number is really 888-XXX-XXXX. I got a nice man on the phone, Jeremy, who explained that my CD would show up tomorrow on line, to just check back.

The Merrill Lynch phone run-around is a very similar story. Unfortunately, I had to get my rep involved, which is a waste of his time as well as mine.

In this case, I couldn't get on line access to my accounts, so I called the number:800-637-XXXX. A person, Jessica, told me that the system was down. I responded that I had accessed two other accounts on line, before and after trying this one. She stuck with her response.

Feeling that this answer was a brush off, I called the same number again, got Steven on the phone who asked me a couple of questions, told me he was going to put me on hold for a minute, but much to my surprise, he transferred me to the branch. I left a message and tried the number again, this time getting Joe who also put me on hold for such a long time that I finally hung up.

It's now been more than an hour and the on line system still cannot be accessed.

I have now spent more than an hour of my time calling 800 numbers only to get no satisfaction or information.