Chapter 8, Online Retail and Services

For this blog entry I decided to look at the online financial services industry and more specifically the customer satisfaction end.

Consumers like online financial services because they like to save time, like most people; they also desire the information available from that institution as well. But consumers also don't like when financial institutions seem to be taking advantage just because they think they can get away with it.

Bank of America for example charges a monthly maintenance fee of $12 for not having a checking balance averaging $1,500 or more daily. Bank of America does not have a great track record with customer, and even employee satisfaction ; according to that article they were at the bottom of the industry in terms of reputation. Bank of America lags behind Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Chase, and even JPMorgan in terms of customer service, and they had to deal with paying roughly $2B in penalties over Madoff's ponzi scheme. 

As you can see people are not happy at all with BofA, for a variety of reasons. The screen clip here is only a fraction of hundreds if not thousands of unhappy customers (and rightfully so in most cases) on the corporation's Facebook page.

People also took to the BofA Facebook page to complain about not being notified on any social media platforms about the services being down for the website and mobile today. It sounds to me like BofA is in need of a restructuring of the company as a whole, because there seems to be a disconnect at multiple levels.

 For one thing the PR team at BofA needs to step up their responsiveness and BofA itself needs to seriously consider customer complaints about fees and other issues like getting loans. We all know the bank corporations don't like to lose money, and you might think they would not care about losing a few customers due to monthly fees; but on the grand scheme of things, even if a customer is only worth $500 to BofA, multiply that by even a fraction of the millions of customers they have and you're looking at a few billion dollars in loss. Although, Bank of America did report revenue of $88.94 billion, and total assets of 2.1 trillion dollars in 2013.

Have no fear however, here are a list of banks with online  and mobile banking with absolutely no fees: Click for the list

BofA isn't the only one committing the fee offensive against its customers, there are plenty of other big banks like Sovereign Bank, for example, that recently doubled its maintenance fee to $10 (can be avoided if you deposit $500 or more monthly). Also, banks like Union Bank are getting more creative by charging for things like "cutting the line when in a telephone queue" and "..$1.50 a month for online bill paying" to try and squeeze more money out of their consumers.