When Bank of America isn’t busy calling their customers liars, they seem to occasionally do the right thing.

Steve D. religiously pays his Bank of America credit card on time. Good for him! But one month, he noticed a late charge applied to his account. After calling customer service, it turned out that he’d been involved in a bit of a fluke: he’d paid his credit card bill one day before the end of the period and a straggling $40 charge came through that he didn’t pay. Remarkably, BoA decided to reverse the charge.

We’ve read good and horrific stories about Bank of America’s customer service. We imagine that all these stories are still indicative of a company with customer service problems: if you can’t offer consistently good customer service to your customer and getting a good, thoughtful rep is pretty much double sevens, it’s actually worse and more nerve-wracking than universally poor customer service. But we’re glad things worked out for Steve. His email is after the jump.

I’ve been with Bank of America for a long time and had relatively few problems with them, but a recent experience reminded me why I haven’t gone out seeking a new bank.

I have only one credit card (and it’s from BoA), and I’m religious about paying it off, in full, every month. I’m really just using it (1) for the Rewards points, with which I can get cash rebates, and (2) to improve my credit score for mortgage purposes in a couple years. Well, a couple months back, my statement arrived with a “Late Payment Fee” of $30, which came as a shock to me, since my online account showed a payment in full on the day the previous statement period had closed.

I called customer service, and I got an excellent rep who patiently explained to me that I had made my payment one day too early — I needed to wait until one day after the period closed. In this case, a stray $40 charge had come through between my payment and the actual end of the period. So I had one $40 charge from that statement to which no payment was applied.

This explanation made sense. I had messed up, albeit with a relatively minor amount of money. So I went out on a limb — “I appreciate your explanation and understand now to wait until one day after the statement period closes before making a payment. Since I’ve been with you guys a long time and pay my account in full every month, do you think you could reverse the charge this one time?”

And she did. And what’s more, a month later I got hit with a “Finance Charge” for the same issue, and a quick call to customer service reversed that as well. And now it’s been two months, and I checked my credit report, and the account shows “Paid on time” for the month in question.

Basically, BoA went above and beyond on this one. I, the consumer, made a mistake that could’ve damaged my credit (the main reason I have the card to begin with), and they valued me enough as a customer to grant me full amnesty — even though they’ve never made a dime off of me on interest with this credit card.

I just thought they deserved a little ‘credit’ for that one.

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