You gotta love Bank of America. On the heels of reports of debt collection harassment—and the recent Bank of America debt collection harassment class action lawsuit that was filed—BofA managed to not only inspire ire in its customers but also make a complete fool out of itself! How did it manage that, you ask? Read on…
In the age of social media-enhanced customer service (ie, have a problem with a company? Tweet it and await your response…), Bank of America is right up there with the best of them responding to customer mentions (#BofA, @BofA, etc…) of the big bank on Twitter. Well, as Gizmodo reported earlier in the week, sometimes too much monitoring for company mentions—along with what looked like either cookie-cutter automated responses or more likely complete incompetence—can make a customer service department look like a bunch of idiots. And, indeed, BofA’s customer service looked that way.
Here’s the low-down: A guy (Twitter handle=@darthmarkh) tweeted that he’d been creating some chalk art on the sidewalk out in front of a BofA location in NYC—and, might I add, he’d done a damn good job recreating the Monopoly game “go to jail” graphic (see pic above). Needless to say, the cops finally told him to stop and move along. He did, and he then tweeted about the incident with the mention of “@bankofamerica”—but his goal was to spread word of BofA’s alleged “illegal foreclosure fraud” rather than to have BofA take notice and ask if he’d like assistance.
Well, the clueless wonders over at BofA customer service reached out to @darthmarkh to find out if there was “anything they could do to help?” Seriously. (See the twitter conversation here). And, it went on to include gems like “We are here to help, listen, and learn from our customers and are glad to assist with any account related inquiries.”
And we’re so glad you are! Can you imagine the level of incompetence it takes to either respond—in person—like that, or to build an automated-response system that would generate such responses regardless of the nature of inquiry it was responding to? #EpicFail doesn’t even do this one justice.
The field day that @darthmarkh’s followers had after that was, as you can imagine, hilarious. And it should be mentioned that as of today, there hasn’t been an official response from BofA or acknowledgment of the screw-up—guess it’s better to stay mum and hope it all just creeps off everyone’s Twitter pages.
Sadly, doesn’t look like BofA has done much since the rallying cry for better customer service from CEO Brian Moynihan back in January of this year. Now, instead of looking like they’re listening to customers and ‘making it easier for customers to do business with the bank’, you have to wonder if anyone at all is actually listening—and, if they are, if they even have a brain.