This one comes because of a frustrating experience with my credit union. Over all, I’ve liked them very much. They have good rates and have had pretty good service. There’ve been a couple of moments of mild idiocy on their part (letting a check go through for more than the amount I wrote on it, for instance), but those moments don’t happen often and have been quickly resolved.
This time it’s a matter of annoyance. I like their online banking option. I tend to check in every day to make sure I haven’t missed putting anything in the checkbook. We use our debit card more than anything else, so we do occasionally miss writing things in the register. (It doesn’t happen often anymore… we used to be worse about it.) Today when I went online to check the account, I couldn’t access my information. Every time I tried to sign in, it told me that my session had timed out and oh-so-helpfully gave me the option to either sign back in or sign out. Um… I hadn’t signed in in the first place. Hadn’t been on at all yet today.
At this point I wasn’t overly frustrated. I figured I’d try a few things and then, if nothing worked, I’d let them know about the problem. I tried choosing each of the options they gave me (signing on again, signing off and then signing back on…), and I tried going through their home page into account access since I’ve had it bookmarked and figured they may have changed the official URL or something. Nothing worked. The only other thing I could think to do that might help was clearing my cookies, but I decided that by that point they should really know about the problem. That was when I started to get frustrated.
Nowhere on their site could I find a “help” link, a “contact us” link with an email address, or even a direct phone number to let someone in their tech area know about the issue. I found some unhelpful FAQ’s (mainly about how to set up your account access in the first place), but there was no option there of contacting anyone. Here’s my beef: if you’re a business who’s going to have an online presence, you need to support it. I’m sorry, but if people are having technical problems, they should have an easy way of reporting them. I finally ended up calling them at their membership number, waiting for 10 minutes or so to talk to someone, telling her the problem, getting a different phone number from her, then getting disconnected as she tried to transfer me to the other phone number, calling the other number, waiting 5 minutes or so to talk to someone there, only to hear, “Yes, someone else just called about that. It seems to be intermittent. Can you try while we’re on the phone now? No? Ok, well, hang up and try again.” *sigh*
I think I’ll write them a letter and suggest adding a link with an email address so I don’t have to go offline to contact them. 😛 So far they’ve at least accepted suggestions kindly even if they haven’t acted on them most of the time. 🙂 Well, I guess you don’t necessarily choose a credit union for how nicely their online tech support system works. 🙂