Back in October, I wrote about some Bank of America customer deciding that he would use my Gmail account’s address as the destination for all of his online banking notices, and about how the BoA reps painstakingly claimed to not be able to do anything to deal with the error. The story ended OK, though — I gave them a second chance by calling back a few days later, and ended up getting a competent manager who found the right accountholder and then called him to ask him to correct his error. For two weeks or so, the notices stopped — but then they started right back up again, with the same last four digits of the account number. The realization that the same person put the wrong email address into his BoA account preferences a second time made my brain hurt, so I just put it on the back burner and hoped that it would sort itself out (ha, ha). Alas, they kept coming, so today, I called BoA again.

In contrast to that first phone call back in October, this time the company performed admirably. The first-tier rep understood how annoying this is and got me to his manager quickly (saying that he didn’t have the authority to browse the account database or cold-call customers). The manager spent a few minutes looking up every accountholder with the same first initial and last name as me (which corresponds to the format of the Gmail account), and in about four minutes, she had him. She promised that as soon as we hung up, she’d again contact him, and she’d also leave a detailed note in my account so that if when this happens again, it won’t even take this long to handle.

As frustrating as bad customer service is, good customer service can be even more gratifying.