Um...Where'd My Bank Go?

It was odd enough that my banking website didn't load--no "Under Construction" sign, no "We're having problems, come back later." Just a "UCCU-who?" from Firefox.

But when calls to any of their half-dozen numbers returned the same message, "All sockets are busy, try later," I started wondering. This is, you know, like, my BANK. It has all my money in it! Do my debit cards still work? Should I start looking up the details of the FDIC insurance?

Since I already had errands to run in that part of town, I swung by and asked what was up. Apparently they hadn't been robbed or gone out of business or had a run on the bank, just all their computerized systems were down.

Two questions come to mind:

1. Is there no backup system in place? A bank seems like a pretty critical place to have not working.

2. Why are ALL their systems (phone AND computer) on the same network? You'd think a bank would understand the concept of "not having all your eggs in one basket."

Anyway, we'll see how long it takes to get working again...

Utah Community Credit Union and Customer Service

Even more important than the number of problems a particular company gives you is the speed and convenience with which they solve those problems. Think about it--if you had a company that you only had one problem with, but it took two months, a dozen phone calls, and the sacrifice of a goat to fix the problem, how would that compare with a company that gave you five problems but solved each one with a two-minute phone call?

Let's consider three companies:

Comcast, T-Mobile, and Utah Community Credit Union (UCCU)

Comcast: caused me lots of problems trying to get installed (do they want my money or not?!). Each time, I had to call and spend 15 minutes on the phone trying to explain the problem, then having to hear that the earliest they can schedule help is a week away. Three weeks later, the problem is fixed, but I have to make another serious of incredibly frustrating phone calls to get the billing fixed now. Customer satisfaction: non-existent.

T-Mobile: charged me a $30 fee, apparently a legitimate fee that the service rep forget to tell me about. Took one phone call, required a transfer to a supervisor, who then promised to call the service rep to double-check I was telling the truth. Supervisor couldn't contact the service rep, so went ahead and refunded the money. Great, but had the potential to turn nasty if the supervisor had actually contacted the service rep, and the service rep got scared he'd get in trouble and claimed he had told me about it. Anyway, problem solved. Customer satisfaction: good.

UCCU: charged us a late fee on a car-loan payment because the teller deposited the money in our checking account instead of loan account. Required a couple phone calls, and we had to do some digging in our transactions to find the day and error, but there was no need to transfer us to a supervisor, the first guy on the phone we talked to accepted our explanation and refunded the service food. Customer satisfaction: very good.