The day USAA delivered the worst example of customer service I've come across, I began looking for another mortgage lender to finance my house. I also decided to begin limiting the amount of my money that is managed by the USAA Investment Management Company. I called to have them stop automatic withdrawals that were made from my USAA checking account to three mutual funds, two of which were IRA's. A USAA service representative told me that I needed to send the request in writing, and she gave me a fax number and a group to send it to the attention of to make sure it was routed to the correct area.
I sent this fax on March 22nd. I fully expected that a deduction that was scheduled for the 1st of each month would not be deducted from my account on the 1st of April. I also expected that deductions to the two IRA's that were made on the 15th of each month would be stopped as well.
Imagine my surprise when I received a statement after selling some of the shares that showed that I had bought, against my will, more shares in the fund on the 1st of April. They also took money from my checking account on the 15th to purchase shares in two IRA accounts.
I was not pleased.
I re-sent them the original fax, along with a cover letter asking that someone call me by the close of business the following day to tell me how it happened that my instructions were not complied with, and how they could fix the situation.
Do you think they called me? Unfortunately not. When I called them after 4 p.m., I was first told that I had sent the initial fax to the attention of the wrong group. I asked the person to connect me to the manager of that group so I could find out why they didn't forward my fax to the right place and to find out how they could work with me to fix the mistake. After several minutes of waiting, the lady came back on the line and told me that her group had in fact received the fax I'd sent the night before, but apparently hadn't dealt with it yet. She was prepared to stop the deductions and call it a day. She didn't seem to appreciate my concern that several hundred dollars of mine were taken from my checking account and put into mutual funds and IRA's. I asked to speak to the person in charge of her area.
After another several minutes, I spoke to someone who did recognize that there was clearly a problem, and that USAA was responsible for it. He agreed to work with the Investment Management Company to try to back out, the mutual fund purchase, the IRA purchases, and the the portion of the overdraft on my checking account caused by their misappropriation of my funds. I told him that I'd be glad to give him a couple of days to work it out and get back to me. I made it clear to him that if he had any intention of keeping me as a customer, he would not just back out the transactions, but would have some explanation for how the ball was dropped for a month and what would be done to fix the process. No, I don't want the responsible person to be fired, I just want to know how the ball was dropped, where the breakdown was, and how it will be fixed.
I'll add to this page once I hear back from him....
Later...
On April 23rd, I was informed that USAA was able to roll back all the transactions that had been mistakenly made. The USAA rep told me that he was at a loss to explain why my fax hadn't been acted on, but assured me that situations like this are taken very seriously and they would look into what happened and would make sure it didn't happen again. I asked him to let me know when he found out so I could have a bit more confidence in the bank. I will add that explanation here when he tells me.
On May 15th, I received my USAA MasterCard bill. Turns out the overdraft and the service charge for it were not removed, so I had to call them once again to get that straightened out. I called back the supervisor I'd spoken to on the 23rd and left a message for him reminding him that he had promised me an explanation for what had happened with my lost cancellation order and inviting him to explain how the ball was dropped with removing the overdraft. I'll add the explanation when I get it....
On May 19th, I received a call from the supervisor. He had no explanation for why the overdraft and service charger weren't removed. For the original problem with the fax being misplaced for a month, it turns out that my mis-routed fax should have been placed in a "bin" (I'm not sure whether that is a physical or a virtual bin) that would be checked periodically by people from the group who should have handled it. Somehow, this was never done. Either the fax never made it to the bin, or it was retrieved from the bin and then vanished without a trace. The supervisor told me that the fix was to re-emphasize using an existing process that would have called for the people who handled the request to make an entry in a "diary" that would provide some mechanism to trace who had taken ownership of it (and presumably that the request was carried out).
For what it's worth, the supervisor I spoke to was professional, understood my concerns, and seemed to appreciate the impact that these sorts of problems would have on my future business. I'm still looking into other banks that can provide better service.