We recently moved down to New Orleans from Arkansas and as a result had to open a new bank account because Bank of America has no bank branches in Louisiana. Since opening our new account at Chase, my husband and I have had a heck of a time closing our BofA account. We've made an effort to close all our automatic account charges to BofA, but frustratingly enough, a few of them would continue to show up and then our account would end up negative, we'd get an overdrawn charge, and have to move money from Chase to BofA to correct the issue.
We contacted BofA a while back when this was happening, and were told that we needed to get our account to a positive balance and then we could close the account. After doing that, we called BofA again to close the account and we were then instructed that the balance needed to be ZERO not positive, not negative, but zero. Our fear in doing that, was that the longer this goes on, the more likely another extraneous charge would show up and we'd end up with a negative balance again. Additionally, we had just been told 2 weeks prior, that we needed a positive balance, not a zero balance.
Here's where Twitter comes in. I posted my frustration on Monday of this week. Within 2 hours, I had received a tweet from @BofA_Help. We traded some tweets back and forth, I DM'ed them my phone number, and the next morning I received a call from the woman who had been tweeting with me, Kasey. Based on @BofA_Help's Twitter account, Bank of America appears to have 6 customer service reps in place to manage issues they find on Twitter. When I spoke with Kasey yesterday morning, the discussion took about 10 minutes; she had my account up prior to calling me so she knew who I was and likely saw the activity on my account. She assured me that she would close my account, refund our last overdraft fee, and FedEx me a check for the remaining balance, which I should receive today. She ended the conversation by saying they were sorry to see me go, but understood our reasoning considering there are no physical BofA's here and she said that she hopes we will consider their bank again in the event they do open branches in Louisiana, to which I said absolutely. In all honesty, we've never really had an issue with BofA since opening our account in California 8 years ago (BofA's online banking site is alot more user-friendly).
As for this experience, since this has happened, I've told everyone that I work with about it. All in all, I give BofA's customer service major kudos for empowering their customer service reps on Twitter the authority to act appropriately and swiftly to control the damage and rectify the situation. I'm willing to retract my original BofA post, and that's why I'm sharing this - much more positive experience.
