He/she seems honest enough. As I have not dealt with Chase I have nothing to go by except this CSR's statements. I must say they do sound fair and logical. Having said that, I do despise the credit card companies I have for the fees and rates they charge.

"As far as losing a customer, to be honest, if I lose you, I gain somebody else. The credit card industry is one big revolving door. There is some other person on the phone right now, at Bank of America, at Citi, at "Name Big Bank Here" telling one of their Reps the exact same thing, that they're leaving. And where will that person go..? Probably to Chase."

If a CSR related that kind of attitude to me and I was the supervisor, they'd be canned in a heartbeat. Afterall, the job market is just a big revolving door. By firing someone who doesn't care about customer retention when that's their job, I've opened up a job for someone who does.

"are treated like like a number" ... "as an added bonus, I speak clear and fluent English."

Just messin, great article.

This person seems burt-out on the job. Giving good customer service leads to client loyalty. I'm a "non-profit" customer regarding credit cards, but I would possibly be a great mortgage or auto-loan client to a bank that gave consistantly good service. Ask me to close my account, and I'll most defintely seek other banking needs elsewhere.

Maybe it is the mood I am in but it seems most of your position comes down to "kiss my ass and we will get along just fine."

@ShortBus: That's why you're not the supervisor. You can't see the truth - THEY ALWAYS COME BACK.

@ShortBus: This is especially true in the call center environment and is a reason i feel that there is alot of negative experience, especially the larger the call center. The lowest level representatives probably are no more then 6 months on the job, as the rep gets more experience they promote them to a next level or another department or those reps simple quit. What i believe call centers need to realize, is they need some experience representatives at the lowest level, since this is the first contact with customers and it is the first impression of the company on the customer.

Regarding #4; With the amount of mail that gets misdirected im my neighborhood, I thought I would avoid the worry about statements not arriving in the mail or arriving late, so I have ebills set up with my bank for Capitol One, Citicard and Chase. All went well for a while, then a couple of months ago, Citibank sent my bank the ebill two days after it was due and the next one was only a week before the due date. This month, Capitol One's ebill is late. I'm waiting for Chase to pull the same stunt. It's very frustrating, but I just have to keep checking all three accounts online and make the payments as soon as the statements show up. Fortunately, I had done so with the Citi card and didn't get burned with the late ebill. It's not only the US mail you can't trust, depending on the company to send ebills on time is unreliable.

The majority of those transaction fees go to Visa and MasterCard.

We do get a small cut of it, I don't know exactly how much

But usually it's not enough to offset the other things on the account, especially if you just have a balance transfer amount on the card, and aren't using it. I mean, if you drop 30k every month, then it would be enough, but other people spending 2k or 3k it wouldn't be

Sorry but I call BS on this Chase "rep".

@ShortBus:

I think you may be missing something. This CSR is reflecting the credit card culture, not creating it. I think he gets a pat on the back for showing that attitude. It's not the CSR that doesn't care about retention in this situation, it's Chase itself.

I can't remember where i heard this, but the term for people who pay on time every month are not called "Non-Profit". They are called, and I'm serious, "Deadbeats".

I love being a deadbeat.

Thought I would clarify something posted in reference to the fees charged to merchants that accept the card. Actually, the largest amount of that charge actually does go to the issuing bank and V/MC actually gets the smallest portion of that fee. The issuing banks make roughly 1.5% + $.10 on retail credit trans and 1.85% + $.10 on not present trans (these fees are less for debit cards). I guess the moral of this is that as a 'non-profit', you are still generating revenue.

2. You have to verbally state your request. I'm not allowed to just waive fees, even if you and I both know that's why you called.

That's good to know, it may explain the situation I had with Microsoft about a broken Zune a while back where the CSR just kept going over the same fixes until I got frustrated and asked why we couldn't just RMA it. I thought I was being polite and letting him do his trouble shooting, he was probably going crazy waiting for me to mention the return so he could get me off the phone.

@trollkiller: Hey, it is like anywhere else. They've got some small measure of leeway in what they do. Piss off a sales person and then ask for a 10% discount? Good luck.

CSR rewards customer for treating them nicely. Who would have figured?

I have to say, the Chase rep insider is too well spoken to last in that position for long. She seems intelligent, and competent. I wish her well.

@DallasDMD: Agreed. This guy really just sounds like one of the CSR's I have had bad experiences with.

@DallasDMD:

I actually believe that the CSR is on the up and up. They logi behind keeping you and offering you rewards is the "hope' that Chase has that you will go in debt. That you will fall behind. or of something happens in your life - laid off, illness etc, that you will use Chase to bury yourself in debt.

I think they general strategy here is "throw out a bunch of lines and see if the fish bite"

I would bet that in the long run if they look at ALL the "Non-profits" over time, the ones that eventually start generating money for Chase (as per going into actual debt) offsets the cost of "losing" money of "Non-profits" that never slip.

Consider that it's possible that ONE slip up (ie a late payment or one time rolling the debt over a month) might very well cover the losses of said "non-profit" for say a year. so even money right there and maybe, a windfall in the future. I mean Chase can cross their fingers you'll get laid off...heh

If you won't forward customer problems, whether isolated or systemic, you're not really a "representative". Makes me wonder how companies ever discover and solve problems within their organization, I would guess it happens only when someone finds a way around the system.

Quote:
"What you do is, call the customer service line, and ask the Rep to exclude you from all marketing or solicitations. We'll remove you from all mailing lists, all telemarketing, all special offers, emails, everything. Takes about 2 minutes and you're all set."

Really? Two minutes? Please go ahead and test this yourself. Good luck getting through to a rep in two minutes. Almost anytime I call anywhere the customer service line says, "Please hold, we are having an unusually high call volume" with little clue about how lone the queue might be or when to call when the wait would be shorter.

@nytmare: Reread 4. "If you really want to voice a concern, write or email our executive office. Yelling at me about is gonna do nothing. I'm not the one in the boardroom making all these rules and regulations."

Get it? The rep can't forward problems to anyone who'll fix them. At best, he/she will be disciplined for not "owning the interaction" and escalating too many customer complaints.

BTW, mysterious Chase rep, I think I was pegged for your outsourced job (not yours specifically, but you know what I mean)... sorry, man! Hopefully you've found the career of your dreams since. :)

I left a few months after transition when it became clear that not violating national banking/consumer laws, not maintaining vermin-free workplaces with functional plumbing, not providing more than one week of training from people who'd never done the job themselves, expanding the business, etc., were less of a priority than shuffling American workloads up to our itchy, ignorant, disgruntled, and UNDERPAID "heritage" hires. Although I did enjoy the expression on one of their transition auditors' faces when he personally witnessed all this. It made my pending resignation a triumphant gesture.

This has nothing to do with this particular CSR, but Chase is the dumbest bank that I've ever dealt with. I only have my IRA with them and it's such a battle to make things work. They change addresses to where to send the check, and then checks that are sent directly from my BofA account never get deposited. They are lost or returned. Then I put a stop payment on the lost ones, Chase finds them and deposits them anyway. It's a complete nightmare. I would never having a checking/savings/credit card with them. I fear their stupidity.

I still haven't seen a rebuttal to my comment that no matter what these companies just hate having to have customers.

@Buran: Here is rebuttal: "They like having customers"

Yeah, those "unusually high call volumes" announcement seem to be used permanently, oddly enough.

Perhaps if our secret CSR actually tried calling the number that ordinary cardholders get he'd realize that no one ever gets through in the "2 minutes" he speaks of. That's one of the reasons we're always pissed at bank CSRs. Having to listen to a half-hour of truly shitty muzak before we speak to a human being has a way of souring people's mood for some unknown reason.

@ColoradoShark: "Good luck getting through to a rep in two minutes."

Oh my goodness. Looks like we have another person who isn't flagged as a priority customer and avoids the wait.

My biggest problem with Chase has been them changing my due date. I have had bills get lost in the mail but I do get ebills now and I scheduled all my bills to happen on or after a certain set date towards the end of every month, and I just pay everything then, even if I do not have the bill. It saved me with Citi a few months ago when their ebills were late.

I really do not find the customer service to be good with Chase, but then I think Citi usually sucks too. AMEX has been good to me. I think I just wish I felt like staying with a company for an extended period of time meant something. I've been with Citi and AMEX for over 10 years and I think I have rarely had a late payment, if ever, in all those years. However, when I call them, none of that seems to factor in. I think customer service just sort of sucks. Then again, having worked customer service, the people on the other end can also suck.

Chase Insider: You mentioned in your original post that Chase reps have visibility to other Chase accounts including mortgage - does this go both ways - IE if I have a Chase Auto Loan, do their CS reps have visibility to Mortgage & CC accounts?

I ask because I had a hellish interaction with a Chase Auto rep about a year ago where she really treated me like sh!t, made promises that weren't kept regarding removing a late fee, and required several calls before I gave up and just paid off the loan a couple of months early to be done with it. I'm probably a 'valuable' customer since I have Mortgage and CC accts w/Chase. I'm in the process of closing my Chase CC account now and am shopping for a refi because the experience was so negative and I want off Chase completely. I told the rep that I held these other accounts long in good standing and she didn't seem to care. I was just amazed by how horrid the customer service was and the apparent willingness for them to lose a Credit Card and Mortgage customer over an $11 late fee when I had never been late prior for the life of the loan. Truth be told, the loan was 0% interest, which probably made me a "no profit" for that loan but from the macro point of view the expense Chase will have to incur to (maybe) get me back someday is much higher than the $11 fee. And that's to say nothing of the 3x20min calls that probably cost them 3x that amount in CS wages.

Ughhh. Credit card companies have always left a bad taste in my mouth, and this 'confession' did nothing to change that - as a matter of fact, I just feel slimy after reading this crap. I need to take a shower.

Bottom line is - don't be late, and only take out as much credit as you can afford.

@ColoradoShark: I just called Chase to get off their mailing list. It took about 5 minutes to speak to a person so I just hit the speakerphone button and did other things while wating.

Once I got a person, it took about 30 seconds. Although she did say it may take up to 90 days to be completely off the solicitation list as things may already be in the pipeline. That frustrates me much more than having to wait a few minutes on speakerphone.

@clevershark: I know! It drives me insane. If call volumes are unusually high 24/7... maybe the company should hire more people?

Pity the French-Canadian caller, though: one of the places I worked sends those calls to voicemail during 8 hours of the day, and those are when French-speaking reps are scheduled to work. Otherwise, they go to the States, where an English rep conferences in an external translation service to handle the call. Ridiculous! They almost always hear "Due to an emergency at one of our sites, your call has been rerouted..." perpetual emergencies, methinks.

"This may come as a surprise, but remember those 'Non-profit' cardmembers we've talked about. Well, if something comes up, we are advised to encourage you to close the account. That's why the threat of "I'll transfer my balance elsewhere" might be met with the Rep offering to close the account during that phone call. "

I can attest to this myself, as a Chase cardholder (not for much longer). I have a Chase card that I got initially as part of a balance transfer, and paid it off. My usage on it is minimal. One month, I forgot to pay my $17 balance (yes, my fault, not arguing that), and my APR shot up to 28%. I rarely use the card and decided that I would just continue my good (as in, pay off the balance) history for a few months, then use that as leverage to ask for a lower rate.

When I called to ask for a lower rate, I was told in no uncertain terms that it was not possible, as I didn't qualify for any promotions. I said I wasn't looking for a promotion, but a lowering of my APR based on my good payment history, and I was still told no. I asked for a supervisor, still no. When I said, "Well, guys, you leave me not a lot of choice but to close my account", the response was, well, we're sorry to hear that. Goodbye.

I wasn't quite sure why absolutely no attempt was made to work with me, and now I can see why. I'm of no use (ie, profit) to Chase.

@Buran: It's because your comment was reductive. It has that rhetorical smack of "Ta-da!" Only you've not made any real point; you've simply created noise.

No, you DO take most of the interchange

Re: response to DALLASDMD: "8. NON-PROFIT"

As someone who works in Senior Management in the payment processing industry, I can tell you that the bank does, in fact, take the lion's share of the interchange charged to merchants, NOT Visa/MasterCard.

Those individuals who do pay off their bills regularly also generate the highest merchant interchange margins, since they tend to use their cards as spending management tools and try to maximize rewards, but are also very low risk compared to the rest of the customers. So you don't lose as much money on our transactions due to fraud/default risk: i.e. you get higher margins.

So yes, we are profitable to you and if your CSR manager is telling you otherwise, he/she needs to go talk to someone with actual insight into your P&L and risk models. Maybe then he/she will learn that CSRs need to treat these customers at least as well, if not better than the deadbeats with huge balances.

@trollkiller: When did "kissing someone's ass" become the same as treating them like an actual human being. As someone who worked in face-to-face retail for ten years, I much prefered making life difficult for people who were jerks.

And, frankly... no... the guy on the other side of the counter doesn't care if you're his customer or not. If we make 99 people happy and you miserable, we can call it a pretty solid effort for the day.

I think the moral of the story is the same wherever you go these days:

First, be nice to the people serving you - it either comes as a real shock to them, or it helps you in getting what you want. Their job is just that - a job to pay the bills. There may be some fulfillment in helping people, but they get no satisfaction from explaining a company's policies that make no sense to anyone.

Second, recognize what the person serving you can or cannot do, and will or will not do. Our Chase CSR *can* assist with you with things when you ask them to. They're trained on a 'reactive' basis - in other words, only doing what they're asked to do, if they're asked to do it. He/she *cannot* make overarching changes to the 'system' or the amount of late fees. In many cases, they see glaring errors or problems with a customer or their account - and they can't do a thing to proactively assist them. What they will or will not do goes back to my first point - as Mantari said, "Piss off a sales person and then ask for a 10% discount? Good luck."

Third, recognize that for-profit businesses aren't in business to be 'nice' to customers. They're in it to make money. These days it's easier than ever to tell if the business is making money off of you (or not). If you're not making them money, they may not want to spend any time/money/resources in making you happy. If you're self-employed, would you spend any time/money/resources on jobs where you're not coming out ahead in the end?

Fourth, given enough time in the same (or similiar) position in the same (or similiar), you begin to understand and know much more than you used to. Our Chase CSR may not be an Accountant, but perhaps he/she was an Accounting major in college. Maybe she knows enough about the credit card industry to know the bank gets a 'small' cut of Visa / MC transactions.

Fifth, every company makes mistakes. Whether you continue putting up with them is up to you. If they shrug their shoulders (or offer to close your account) when you make a threat to take your business elsehwere, follow up on that threat. Don't expect to give you something just because you make a threat - they get those all the time.

Having worked with CSRs (admittedly not in banking), they're trained by [usually] borderline schizo freaks to take as little time as possible on a call, do the least amount of work possible, and move on. They're paid to answer phones, not give a damn about anything. That's what the sales force is for. Everytime CSR loses a customer, a salesman gets his free trip to a ballgame. Just my 2cents.

Read both posts. Great tips indeed!

There are a few good tips in these posts, but they're essentially very well-written Nuremberg defenses for CSRs.

I still think going directly to a supervisor is better than talking to the first person who picks up your call.

This was written by someone in managment. I've worked in several call centers (Chase Human Resources, Bank One & Verizon) Honestly, we are there to keep our job not to help the customer. At Chase in Human Resources (Access HR in Houston) I was trying to help the customers too much and got "the frown". Companies shoot themselves in the foot, because to a certain extent, we can give back the banks money (Bank One at the time). So I adopted the attitude, "This isn't my money...so why should I care" and gave back all fees all the time. When Chase and Bank One merged, upstate Chase New York employees where paid a stipend to relocate to Texas and Florida, then Chase bought Bank One (whom paid their people less for the same jobs) Well, one bank doesn't need two people for one job. Guess who they kept? You guessed it BK1 employees. Now to their credit Chase (if they keep you) does their employess well, actually very well relatively. Honestly, from an economic perspective If I were this informants supervisor, I'd promote them. The average Customer Service Representative on the floor isn't this smart. I've been one, so it equates to "it's ok, because i'm a doctor". I teach school now and they are no smarter and sadly its more like communism.

@lenagainster: You might want to look into whether the problem is with your bank rather than the credit card companies. It seems like an awfully big coincidence to me that the ebills would be arriving late from multiple different companies. I've only had one get delayed once, and when it happened my bank sent me a message telling me about the delay (it was on their end), apologizing, and informing me that I should maybe make other arrangements to pay my bill on time.

Those fees that he was talking about, they more than pay for everything. Around 3% of each transaction goes to the bank. Mailing and other costs are much less expensive than many people think. Remember economies of scale?

I work at chase collections and all these tips are dead on. Especially the one about the CSRs that are NOT trained and who never get corrected. Inconsistency seems to run rampant there. Oh, and anyone reading this...if you have payment protector on your account: Cancel it IMMEDIATELY. It's OKAY to use however you have to be current and enrolling yourself into it after a major life event is quite complex and you have to be fast. So you might as well cancel it and save the xtra monthly charge. Furthermore, once you cancel it FOLLOW UP and MAKE damn sure it's cancelled. Payment Protector has a nasty habit of continuing to be billed even after you request it be cancelled.

Another thing, not getting your statement and using that as an excuse is just lame. Sorry, I'm usually on the side of the consumer however people need to take responsibility. Statement or no statement my folks still pay their cards each month . AND, if the statement never arrived they'll call the bank anyways to complain and to report a payment has already been sent.
Oh, and I love the "threat" of "I'll just file bankrupcy" or "I took my account to a credit counseling agency and they told me to not speak with you". Priceless. People need to wake up and get informed. A good place to start is the consumerist. :)

Consumerist really should offer deals on Tucks Pads and Preparation H to deal with all the butthurt in the comments section regarding this post.

Chase is not fair and logical. They will hit you with a scam.

This is the year that all the credit cards will be defaulted, so we can all laugh when this jerk is out of a job.

@nytmare: At BestBuy.com, we have no way to forward customer complaints. We can log them in our notes, but have no one to send it to. We can't forward them to our customer relations department, to a supervisor, anything. It's been the same for the other CSR positions I've worked in. You're better talking to consumer relations yourself, at least that's a formal complaint.

@nickripley: He already is... read the first post. Insults are much more effective when they're issued from an informed stance!

First let me say that I am a complete slave to Chase and they definitely make money from me.
My mortgage is through Chase and I have 3 Chase cards with over $12,000 on them and up until last week I hated them.
I've never had an issue getting through to a CSR when I call, my problem is the language (or thick accent) barrier (God bless globalization).
I was frustrated that they where trying to raise one of the cards rates to 31% (when one of the other cards is 17% and the other is 9.99%).I tried to call and could not get any satisfying answer as to why the rate was going to go that high, then I went to the branch and the personal banker wasn't able to help me out. I was ready to give up and let them eat all of my debt through a spiteful bankruptcy, when it hit me to look on Consumerist and try and find an Executive CSR number and see what I could accomplish. Well I found and made 1 call and the reason for the increase was explained and when I told her all I was doing was trying to be responsible and pay my bills, she told me I could close the high interest rate card account and they would lock in a lower apr. I explained that I was planning on refinancing my house and I didn't want to have my credit score affected by closing an account. The Executive CSR told me she would look into it and call me back. She called me back in 2 or 3 hours and told me she had all of my cards interest set at 9.99%. AMAZING!!!
At this point I'm obviously very happy with Chase!
I guess my main point is that if you get the right people, on the phone, even this huge money whore will take care of you.

@That70sHeidi:
That's not how it works at Chase. I'm not the rep who wrote the post(s), but I did work as a Chase CSR until I was laid off in September. There was a split between Inbound Servicing (just plain customer service) and Service-to-Sales (read: upselling for things like Payment Protector). A significant portion of the six week training for IBS goes toward what I like to call basic human decency training (they call it "Cardmember First"). I was in STS and our training was ten weeks (we even got college credits for it). So the comments about people not being trained at Chase are laughably ignorant to put it mildly. The problem isn't that CSRs aren't trained well enough to do their jobs or even to care. I firmly believe that empathy isn't something that can be taught anyway, no matter how much training goes into it. Either you're a douchebag or you're not, it's really that simple. The problem is that the very nature of the job demands a certain level of douchebaggery; the discerning rep knows when to get douchey with people and when not to.

I know people are going to scream at me for that, but it's true. Banks are the devil, (hell, when you've worked for one, you know that a little better than most) and there's a special circle in hell reserved for CC companies, but you have no conception of the amount of fraud and outright scamming that CSRs see on a daily basis. I have zero sympathy when dealing with scammers because it's the good customers who suffer from their antics, and I'd get douchey with them in a minute if it was clear they didn't have genuine issues, but they were trying to get over. I'm talking about the one asshole who literally called fourteen times in the span of a week trying to get bonus cash for the Freedom card, when he admitted (after initially lying to me and changing his story a couple of times) he knew he didn't sign up during the period that promo was running.

Fairly or not, people like that tend to make you look at everyone who calls in with a jaundiced eye. It's human nature. For every person whose statement really did get lost in the mail, there are 20 who just didn't open it and are now trying to get out of a late fee. The shittier reps let that color their view of everyone and treat them accordingly. Good reps develop their bullshit detectors, giving people the benefit of the doubt unless given a reason to do otherwise. Also, as a front end rep you are basically helpless when it comes to certain things--as an example, we have NO power to lower APRs. Zero. All we can do is check to see if you're "retention eligible" (I'm sure you'd be shocked to hear 95% of non-profitable customers aren't), and if you are, we can transfer you to the retention department, who have the ability to offer you lower rates and goodies to keep you. If the system doesn't deem you retention eligible, the transfer button is literally greyed out. It was maddening to be so handicapped by corporate when I sincerely wanted to help someone, and it happened too often. Add to that the vicious abuse from customers, the fact you have to be Sherlock Holmes and Perry Mason in the span of two minutes or less, and the constant pressure to make stat goals...would you do that for $11 an hour? Call centers are just fast food McJobs without the paper hat, and I'd never go back to one.