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An awesome story on the Consumerist site, which i am intently jealous of because they have such great stories. This new story contains a confession from a Chase Bank customer service representative about how they view customers.

There are 3 levels of cardmembers at Chase. They are segregated as BEST, VALUABLE, or NON-PROFIT.

BEST
cardmembers make up a small minority of the people at Chase. If I talk to 100 people in a day, maybe 5 are best cardmembers. If you’re a Best cardmember, pretty much anything you want to gets done. You want a late fee taken off? Done. Don’t feel like paying $200 in finance charges? No problem. How do you achieve Best cardmember status? You either have to move a lot of money through the bank, (we can tell if you have a mortgage, car loan, etc thru Chase), or have a high balance that you’re paying a good amount of interest on. If you generate enough fee revenue from finance charges, say $100 per month, and you want a late fee taken off, no problem, we’ll take $39 off this month to make you happy and make sure that $100 monthly keeps rolling in.

VALUABLE
cardmembers make up the majority of people we talk to. Valuable basically means you pay your bills on time, and are in general a good customer. You can get a fee waived also, but not nearly as often. I don’t mind waiving a late fee for you, but usually only every 6 months. Thats standard, but we can base our judgment on it all the way back to a year. And if I remove a late fee for you, dont think you’re getting anything waived in the foreseeable future.

NON-PROFIT
These are the cardmembers who know what they’re doing. They’re the group of people that pay their bill off, in full, every month, like clockwork. They don’t pay finance charges, and they’re never late. They don’t go over their credit line, they don’t have returned payments, and they earn rewards. Which all amounts to the bank isn’t making any money on your account. So if you get a late fee, you have absolutely zero chance of getting it waived. That late fee is revenue for the bank, and it uses it to offset the maintenance on your account. Maintenance includes your statements mailed to you, sending you replacement cards, dealing with customer service, and cashing out rewards point / miles / dollars. For this cardmember, if you threaten to close your account if we don’t do what you want, don’t be surprised to get an offer to close your account during that phone call. Why? What is the incentive to keep you? I know its pretty cold hearted, but thats exactly how it works. You do a great job on your account, but you can get punished. Hey, I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them.

The story goes on to revel more information from this internal Chase Bank employee about they look at:

HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT FROM CUSTOMER SERVICE

  • I WILL GO TO BAT FOR YOU IF YOU TREAT ME LIKE A HUMAN

  • STATE WHAT YOU WOULD LIKE DONE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE CALL
  • YOU ARE NOT A UNIQUE SNOWFLAKE

COMMON SCENARIOS I ENCOUNTER

  • DON’T SAY “MY PAYMENT WAS LATE BECAUSE I DIDN’T GET MY STATEMENT”
  • WATCH YOUR CREDIT LIMIT
  • READ YOUR CONTRACT
  • IF YOU DON’T NEED IT, DON’T BUY IT

Please go and read the full article.

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Steve

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