Unhappily ever after—business lessons learned from our daily lives

I have never hired a MBA other than having my wife run a regional subsidiary for a short period of time before the birth of our first child. Sure, I have had MBA students as interns, but never quite got the chance to ask exactly how they are trained to handle daily business aside from theories and models. I would want to learn my craft as a business manager in addition to being a scientist, perhaps one of the most rewarding aspects of running a research company than an academic lab—you get to do everything you find most intriguing.

In addition to the sell side, our company is of course also a customer to other companies, so are ourselves in our non-corporate lives. If you pay attention, observe how other companies market their products and services to you, deal with your problems and complaints, and the way to stand by a company’s policies and principles, you can learn so much.

I have blogged here last year how CapitalOne, among a number of other banks, disappointed me when I was working to improve our situations with business credit accounts. A month or two later I noticed that our rate with CapitalOne was cut by more than 2/3, and they didn’t even mention it. I still do not know how that happened, but now our CapitalOne Visa card is the most used, and with our current business expansion, I would think that they are duly rewarded for their effort to recognize the value of our accounts and to help me out as much as they can. At the end of 2009 I tweeted about how ATT allowed an unbelievably bad third party service provider to piggyback and cheat on our monthly bills from ATT, which was corrected on the first phone call. Even though that should not have happened in the first place, but the way it was swiftly dealt with at the first level of customer service still shows that ATT is a giant well organized.

More recently I had a discussion with Bank of America over monthly fees for my personal account with them for 20 years, since the first day I came to this country. I still remembered opening my very first bank account with an advance of my first paycheck of $800 from USC at the BOA branch across the street from the campus. In the back-and-forth emails with BOA since late December, a different person responded to me every single time. After I asked for a manager level person to make a decision on either waiving the fee or switching my old account number to a new free checking account (yes, I did mention 20 years’ using that account as sentimental as well as very practical reasons for the request), the same message of how they appreciate my business but I have to abandon my old account, open a new one, transfer all AP, AR, payroll and such, and get free checking. No managers. They used the word ‘courtesy’ twice as showing how they did me a favor by not charging a monthly fee for the first month when they decided it was time to do so, and when they threw me back 2 more months worth of fees, almost like a bone. The worst part was perhaps the inconsistency, since every time it was a new person, she/he did not either understand the whole story or flat-out ignored a previous person’s promise to switch account number.

I was saying to myself, you know I was a 20 year customer as loyal as one can be, a BOA stock holder through good and extremely bad times like right now, a good referral who got at least 10 friends to use BOA, and, as I told them, my wife has mortgage and retirement accounts with them, and most annoying of all, I am a taxpayer who helped bail these bastards out after they screwed up! All I was asking is to get the free checking as they are offering to everybody who knows how to sign up online (so not that it is such a privilege!) and keep my old account number, is that too much to ask?

Settling down, I thought about how I would want my employees to handle such a situation. 1) Technically, I want my online system to be at least flexible enough for a simple account type switch to save all the work hours the representatives have to spend reading, re-reading customer emails, not to mention the completely unnecessary inconvenience to the customer; 2) have management personnel intervene after the 3rd customer email because, obviously, the problem is taking too long to resolve and there is a risk of losing a good customer (unless they believed that I was a bad customer, but I don’t see why); 3) never talk to a customer like you are doing him or her a favor, need to particularly remind ourselves every time we get a unpleasant customer response, always remember who is paying; 4) use one person as a point of contact of every string of discussions, like many businesses already do.

If a service provider gives such slow pain to a customer once, he or she will be feeling and talking about the business unhappily ever after. BTW, I am finally opening personal accounts at Wells Fargo, who courted me since we opened our business accounts there with forever free checking and other goodies. I didn’t take their offer previously because, as I have said, I was a loyal customer to BOA, always remembering my first day in that BOA branch across the campus...but no more.

Idiotic Business Behavior by Large Banks, A Lesson to Be Learned

When I run my business we run into "situations" or more precisely, difficult customers, when you really want to rather not have that customer instead of doing all the extra work it requires to maintain that customer. But never in my clear mind did we imagine going through something that I just encountered at Bank of America, one of our banks for 20 years. It was a simple situation, they set us up for a type of checking account that somehow stipulated that if we did not maintain $10,000 balance we would be charged a $20 monthly maintenance fee. Since I'd never paid monthly fee for our personal or the business accounts of allelebiotech.com, I probably did not bother to ask why the change. The things got tough in late 2008 to early 2009, I had to scramble all personal funds to not lay off employees, who were going through their own personal difficulties especially the younger ones who were paid by hourly.

Now things are better, I get to pay myself a salary again and pay more attention to my own bank accounts, and one of the things I noticed was that I was being charged a $20 fee at some point during the last 12 months. I asked for a refund for a long term customer's sake, got rejected; then I asked to be removed of any such future fees because my business banks always offer unconditional free checking to all my employees, and got rejected again because "the fee was charged correctly". They did offer a solution, go online open a new checking account since all new accounts opened online will be free of fees.

I did open a new account online, and all its online banking features are exactly the same as the checking account I have been using for 20 years, and online for maybe 10 years. Now I have to redo all my automatic payer and payee accounts, direct deposit, transfer routes... to save $20 a month using exactly the same service. If BOA meant to get a protocol right to charge fees while being able to attract new customers through free checking and encouraging online users to save labor costs, they succeeded, I understand their unspoken business reasons. But it they meant to bother customers to a degree that they would rather leave, they have sure succeeded in a unique way, by which business sense no longer aligns with common sense. The inflexibility they demonstrated through their lower level representatives is quite impressive, I would not allow such handling in my own company. It's simple, the cost to attract and maintain a loyal customer like myself, for 20 years, would be so much higher than somehow partially refunding the $20 fees, or a simple management check to remove future fees without forcing me to open a new account.

I see this as a business real situation lesson, and I know I will be fine doing all my business at my business banks. I am just not quite sure if I should also get rid off all my BOA shares, that may seems like an emotional decisions rather then business though...Oh I also will write to my congressmen and my president not to support more bailout money, they encourage bad business attitude.