Survey Says! (Part 1)
How Customer Surveys That Had Nothing To Do With Me Cost Me $4,000 at BofA
I created this blog to talk about unethical banks, customer service issues, and things in the public space that impact us all negatively. From time to time, I will write a story about my time at Bank of America and discuss how the loose ethics of the place that made me a staunch crusader for honesty, customer service, and an ethical workplace.
I will write a memoir of my time at the bank one day soon. For now, you get this never before told story by me about 2 instances where I felt taken advantage of. Enjoy!
Let’s talk about surveys today!
I will be blunt. As a customer, pick your battles when you have something to complain about. Not everything is an egregious affront to your existence when someone messes up while helping you. I promise.
I have helped people recover almost $5 Million from big banks in the last five years by showing them how to effectively articulate your frustration and properly escalate a situation. I am the best at it, period.
Now, if you seek out my help on Twitter and your whole Twitter was created for the sole purpose of bitching out companies who allegedly wronged you, and there’s no other activity aside from that complaining, I will decline to take on your case. Simple as that.
Dude, there’s 3 pieces of bacon on there. Yes they aren’t 10 inches long, but neither is the burger. I think some people just angle for a free burger.
I have a motto, “Do you actually care about consistent service and good experiences for everyone, or are you only complaining because it happened to you?”
People tend to use those bad experiences to make their messed up burger or bank account another brick in the wall of shameful things that the company does.
“Do you know that Burger King pays only $13 in taxes and settled a lawsuit because in the 1990s their playground equipment had lead paint?”
None of that is true. I just made it up. But the person with the fucked up whopper will further enrage themselves researching a pattern of how bad the company is that got their burger messed up. They will point out every negative story to prove their point.
“Wells Fargo opened up 10 million fake bank accounts AND they shorted me .11 from my paycheck today! They should all be in federal prison!”
Yep, it’s all connected. (sigh)
Not all problems are created equal, my friends. Problems should be documented, but they also shouldn’t be scratched so much that they get an infection.
The easiest way to document a complaint is to do a survey given to you by the establishment. Most restaurants, banks, and other companies have a company that handles surveys for them. Companies spend a lot of money trying to find out how their businesses are handling customers. It’s important stuff to make sure they can plug holes in bad customer service and fast…at least that’s the thought.
Some establishments will offer you a premium for filling out a survey. My local McDonald’s used to offer BOGO Big Macs, but now they are cheap and offer a hash brown or small fries. Either way, it’s still free if you answer some questions.
But make sure you understand that these surveys can also sometimes be held against employees in the worst kind of ways. It doesn’t spur on training or anything positive. Usually mediocre managers will use this to wield power on the people on the lower rungs. If it’s because you think you didn’t have enough bacon on your burger, someone is going to have a shitty day based on your complaint of them. Remember that. Would you like that to happen to you?
If you actually have something serious happen to you, yes by all means, take a survey so other eyeballs can see the issue at hand. But it’s a customer responsibility in my opinion to weigh “Is it worth it doing this?” if the issue is something minor like the bank’s doors closed at 3:59pm instead of 4:00pm.
It’s ironic that I am a big survey guy now. I take them because I want to acknowledge good service in a professional, proper way. If I have something bad happen, I do them as part of my process to get clarity on an issue, not to punish an employee somewhere into giving up their job. It is a really complicated thing for me.
When I was at Bank of America, our end of quarter bonuses and our yearly salary increases were tied to our survey scores, and because the bank has the popularity of genital warts most days, our branch would get hit with low marks, not on things we did in a branch, but the company did as a whole.
I have a story about two surveys during my time at Bank of America that affected my pocketbook by about $4,000.
This is a true story at 250 W. Amador
In 2015, I was newly married and we were planning to buy a house in the next year. It was Q1 of 2015, and I had hit my sales goal for the quarter. That meant at least $1,125 was coming my way (That was the house minimum for funding). Couple that with revenue generated, and I was in line for about $2,600 in bonus money for the first three months. Awesome.
One big issue: Our customer satisfaction scores were below average. We were the lowest in the region of 13 banks. It wasn’t because we sucked, it was because we didn’t have enough clients to rate us, and the ones that did rated us 7s and 8s, which BofA counted as 0s, which in turn lowered our bonus pool potential.
I once talked to a worker at Kohl’s that I had a crush on maybe 15 years ago that told me the same thing about that place.
One day, I get a visit from someone I never met in my office. Older white guy. He was from Chicago, and he was financing a high-rise apartment in Chicago with BofA. I had nothing to do with that, nor would I get credit on that. That’s the shitty thing about the bank sometimes. You get stuck fixing some other employee’s issues for them, yet they get the glory and the money and you are a glorified receptionist who can get no credit off this person ever.
The man said he was in town to visit family, and he asked me if I could fax over some paperwork for the loan to the home loan department for him that they asked him for (again). By the way, big banks do that shit when they either don’t want to help you, or they want to stall your loan to work on something else.
They will ask you over and over again for the same things to email and fax, and pretend that they never got them from you. That way if anything goes sideways, you look like a schlub who can’t get his shit together.
He walked in with a pissed aura, but he then saw my Chicago Cubs Keychain on my car keys, and he immediately warmed up to me.
For the rest of the time, it was like two friends talking about our favorite team while his fax was processing. It was 15 minutes or so. We hadn’t won the title yet, but we talked about our chances, and discussed Harry Caray and a lot of other Cub specific things. I swear, not even a supermodel could’ve made that conversation better. He was so nice to me. I gave him the confirmation page, and he shook my hand and thanked me for making a bank trip painless.
I leave a conversation like that so happy, because I felt great at my job.
So about 2 weeks later, I am summoned to my manager’s office, and I am told to close the door. Oh, fuck. What did I do?
“James, how do you feel your service is with clients?” my boss asks me.
How do you answer that?
“Excellent. I love talking to clients.” I said.
“Well, how do you explain getting a 1 out of 10 on a survey?”
I was stunned. I didn’t check Moritz, which was the company that did the surveys. Forgot to check the screen that week so I didn’t see the “1” I got on a survey. My boss handed me a printout with the name. It was the name of the Chicago Cubs fan that I bonded with! What?!?!?!
“Why did you fail this customer?”
“I didn’t!”
“Well, why did you get a 1?”
“I don’t know!” I wanted to fucking cry. I felt betrayed over a conversation about Shawon Dunston and Sammy Sosa.
(I still can’t believe that is Sammy)
”Well, I want to let you know that our scores dropped 9 points this week. We are 20 points below our goal of 78. We got to 100% on our funding, but Maria (our regional boss) has discretion whether or not to pay us, and I don’t think she will pay our incentive because we failed BCCR (our audit) and we are below our satisfaction score now.”
This sucked. All that money gone. I was wallowing for a day with that stupid “1” I got on me that ruined our bonuses, though I think we wouldn’t have gotten paid anyway because of the audit score. It was easy to blame the “1” survey, but I just wanted to know why. Was he a secret White Sox fan in disguise and he did this to fuck me?
I was bored on a Wednesday, so I started clicking on shit. I looked for Moritz, where the survey numbers are kept, and I kept on clicking links until I stumbled upon the comments left on phone surveys. I found my 1, and the man’s name. I will never forget what it said to this day. I have a photo of this. I won’t share the photo on here, because the info was proprietary, and honestly, I don’t want shit from a photo I took 8 years ago, but I will write the text.
“Bank of America home loans is the biggest piece of garbage outfit I ever had the displeasure of dealing with. It took 150 days from application to close, and made me look like a fool to the seller. He thought I was trying to pull out of the deal. Bank of America is a horrible organization that had no problem throwing me under the bus for simply wanting to give them hundreds of thousands of dollars of my money!”
So.. I got a “1” because Bank of America HOME LOANS (A whole other department than me - I’m consumer banking) messed with this guy’s head too much, and my chance encounter with him where all I did was fax documents and talked baseball roped me into the negativity.
When BofA called him to do a survey, they were calling him about “Las Cruces, NM - Amador - James Baca’s Performance" in handling his request.
All I did was hit 12 numbers on a fax machine (9+1800-xxx-xxxx) and a button to feed the paper into the fax machine. But he was so hell bent on talking smack about the bank as a whole that his whole debacle he had with them was put on me for getting that 1. I lost my bonus. All $2,600 of it. Gone, because I was simply there. That one hurt a lot. I needed that money.
The man couldn’t differentiate between me and a bunch of lazy assholes who thought doing expensive mortgages was their birthright. At least we had a glorious afternoon talking about Harry Caray. Wasn’t worth $2,600 though.
#gocubsgo
The next year, I had something similar happen to me. Same scenario. I hit my sales goals for the quarter, and the region’s customer experience goal was low, which meant our payouts would be impacted because of that.
One day, I helped a man who was in his 50s. He needed to close out his account. He said that he was going to move to Montana, and there was no BofA branches there. Simple enough excuse. I had to tell my bosses why these people closed out their accounts, and moving out of our footprint seemed like an obvious reason. I don’t know why they needed to know the reason. It’s not like they were monitoring these reasons to identify trends
I took maybe 1 minute. No need in dragging it out. He already zeroed it out before coming in. I went to get a closing summary, which states who I was, what I did for him, and what account number was closed. It was one sheet. I gave it to him with my card, which was protocol and told him, “If you are ever in the area again, we’d love to have you back.”
He smiled and left.
Two weeks later. I get the same “Go see Barbie (my manager) and close the door.”
Barbie was pissed. “We got another fucking 1 on a survey!”
I liked how she said we. It was on me, but after I found out what happened with the survey, she took it as an assault on all of us.
It was a “1” from the guy I took 60 seconds with to close out the account. The text of the call was available. I clicked on it. This is what he said.
“Stop Calling Me. He just closed my account out. It’s not rocket science!”
LOL. That was it. That was the survey. I got a 1 for not performing rocket science. I typed his name, confirmed his address, hit “close account”, printed a paper, and thanked him. I don’t know how the fuck I could have gotten a 10 out of that. He just didn’t want to be bothered at home, which is why I got the 1.
Since I didn’t get a PhD in Physics, I got punished again by losing all my extra bonus that quarter. I still made $1,125 (which was like $600 after taxes), but the “1” led to an “action plan” by our big bosses, and as part of my performance review, I was reprimanded for not doing rocket science and getting that “1”, and I lost about $1,350.
So I lost $4,000 off the words of two men. One guy who was mad at another department, but took it out on my survey. It’s like beating the pool man up at the hotel for the maid on the 33rd floor knocking on your door when you were asleep.
All of the money taken away from those two instances was discretionary by my bosses. They didn’t HAVE TO withhold the mone.
They took the money away as a motivator to have me sell harder and faster to more clients in the branch. Being pissed was going to make you a BEAST selling more accounts to make them more money, and if you are lucky, you make more money as well. Like a hungry ass dog.
”You’ll make that money back, James!”
Ok. Well, you know you can still give me a money and treat me like a red-headed stepchild and I will be motivated to sell more still. You didn’t HAVE to take that money. Like they would ever think logically though.
That’s why I would rather steal catalytic converters than work for a bank again.
I will be doing a part 2 of this blog post about a three minute moment I had at a fast food restaurant this week where I was irrationally angry over a messed up order, and I immediately thought of teeing off on social media, because I am a self described “Consumer Advocate” and I felt wronged. Then I realized it was over absolutely nothing.
Glad I had restraint though, and now I will have another story to tell later.
But in closing about my 2 survey horror stories at Bank of America, I want to you understand that in a company of over 205,000 people, not all of them are terrible. In fact, most of them are great.
It’s a few greedy, slimy, toady people in $200 suits eating out all the time “For business purposes” with their corporate credit cards that poison the well of good service, great morale, and excellent effort by looking down at the people who worked hard to get them that prestige of a top sales performing region.
They are going to get paid regardless, while the lower end people are going to be told that the boss that actually never fucking saw them in action looked at a bunch of PowerPoints with numbers and determined that you were not worthy of $4,000 in two separate quarters. $4,000 is an amount Bank of America makes in 1…2…3…4! 4 seconds!
Using surveys as a weapon to manipulate bonus money is pretty low of them. Using surveys with data that doesn’t apply to my job role to hold me back from advancement is pretty low of them. It’s a lazy managerial technique to rely on someone else’s words to evaluate your staff as well.
To use another former Cubs announcer’s catch phrase… “Hey Hey”, that’s bullshit, Bank of America.
James
thenotoriousbanker.org
Look for part 2 of this next week.
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