How Do 60 Minute Wait Times & 10% Unemployment Relate?

Believe me, I’m not trying to use Wells Fargo as a whipping boy. But when customer service gets this intolerably bad, someone in San Francisco needs to wake up. Or are they dead?

My wife & I had an HSA (Health Savings Account) with Wells Fargo. I won’t bore you with all the customer-unfriendly stuff they pulled, but recently and for unknown reasons they decided to change our account number and issue a new card with a new PIN, despite our old cards being valid until 2011. Only they sent only my card, without one for my wife. Hey, not more than a minor inconvenience no? No. I tried calling them, got into a waiting queue, and waited and waited and waited. For over an hour.

While I was waiting I tried to reach HSA customer service over the web. You can’t. Then I tried to access general customer service but faced drop down fields for questions giving no appropriate answers. Should I call an HSA account an “auto loan?”Guess where that e-mail would wind up. So I tried their general “call a banker” service for telephone banking. Got through in about 10 minutes. The first question the “banker” asked? “What’s an HSA?” She finally agreed to try contacting HSA service using their internal phone numbers, and I made her promise not to transfer me back into the same queue.

I don’t have to tell you what she did. So, right now, I have no means of getting a second card. Their contact center is that understaffed, despite skilled people galore on the streets, many willing to work for whatever paltry wage they offer phone reps. And I’ll bet most already know what an HSA is. As a customer, I am disgusted WF lets customers stew on the phone for over an hour (maybe multiple hours, who knows?) without dipping into the endlessly deep unemployment pools to put more agents on the phone. Just one more example of how they put customers last.

Why are we still with them? Actually, we used to be 100% Wells Fargo – two businesses and all our personal banking. Private banking, even. We shifted our accounts to a smaller, regional bank two years ago, but forgot to transfer our HSA. When we started having trouble – as in having our HSA debit cards rejected when we had more than ample funds in the account (you know, we used the card too many times in one month, or went over our “limit,” which happens to be less than what’s in the account), we were sort of stuck. As impending empty nesters we’re city-bound, but we don’t know where exactly so don’t know where we’ll bank. But this is so over the top that I’m going to get my wife a card by switching our HSA to a different bank, any bank.

A couple years ago, when we pulled all our other business from Wells Fargo, I posted a blog in CustomerThink titled: “Wells Fargo, 50 Ways to Leave Your Customer.” It drew over 16,000 hits – a near record. Guess lots of others have similar stories.

PS: I wrote this while on hold the second time. When I finished, I needed to go out for lunch. So I decided to leave the call on hold while I was out. When I cam beck, guess what greeted me? “Your call is important to us…”

PPS: A half-hour after the initial post someone did pick up the call. They switched to a new data system that can only generate one card per account. Brilliant, eh?