Thursday, August 07, 2008

Why First South Bank Rocks, and why the NC State Employees Credit Union Sucks!

 

First South Bank

Again… why I love this bank! NO OTHER BANK IN THE WORLD I’VE EVER DEALT WITH DOES THIS!

 

I got a call about two minutes ago from Irene Berardi, who works at the Arlington branch, where I do my personal banking, informing me I had a debit coming through for $100.00 but only had $15.00 in the account. I had just gone to capitalone.com and paid my credit card using the online pay now feature. It shows me my bank accounts associated with the card and asks me to select the account from which to make the payment, based on the last 4 of the card number.

 

Apparently I was as idiot when I selected the account to pay from and selected the wrong one… just a backup savings account I keep for rainy day purposes.

 

Instead of letting the charge go through, charging me $29.00 for a bounce fee, AND running the risk of possibly denying the payment, she just called my cell phone and said “Did you know you have a charge going through on your account and you don’t have funds in that account to cover it?” I slapped my forehead and told her I must have chosen the wrong account to take the funds from, already picturing the problems this was going to cause me when I had to deal with Capital One.

 

“No problem” she says. “Do you just want me to transfer the funds from your other account?”

“Umm.. yeah. That’d be awesome… thanks!” I told her.

 

Done… crisis averted.

 

Did I goof? Yessir. Was it my fault? Yessir, completely.

 

Still, they are nice enough to assume you’re not a total idiot and they actually pick up the phone to call you and ask! I love that bank! That’s the second time something like that has happened in the four years I’ve been banking there

 

Hey! Credit Union! You might want to take lessons from the guys over at First South!

 

State Employee’s Credit Union

Why the credit union sucks!

Everyone wants to bank at the credit union; better interest rates, better online services than other banks, blah blah blah. So, I do. I finally got an account with the credit union a few years ago. Since then I’ve had nothing but problems.

 

Example:

Last week I sent my girlfriend by the bank with a check to deposit. I wrote the check to myself, from my business bank account at First South Bank and she was just to deposit it into our joint checking account so the bills I wrote online the day before would be covered.

 

I get a phone call on her lunch break, almost in tears, telling me the bank won’t take my check! In fact, they have a hold on all checks from me and I’m not allowed to deposit checks. What the F***? Now I cancel an appointment, leave my office, drive to the bank and lose my lunch break, and continue waiting for someone to get of their ass to provide us some customer service….

 

The lady pulls up my account and tells me “Oh. Mr. Jordan can’t deposit checks because there is a flag on his account. He’s in Africa.” I almost lost it right there!  I less-than-politely asked her if I appeared to be in Africa, or rather did I appear to be sitting in front of her pissed as hell because the teller is an idiot? She agreed that my presence in her office did indeed indicate my presence firmly within continental US borders and that she’s waddle over and try to solve the problem.

 

Apparently, there was a flag put on my account, at my request over three years ago when I went to africa. I put that on the account to inform the bank of my travels so I would be able to use my debit card while I was in Africa instead of having my account closed because of suspected fraud the first time I swiped my card from Cairo or something… Meanwhile, for the last three years I’ve been making deposits, withdrawals, and paying bills through that account… why in the hell some retarded teller can’t read her screen is beyond me, but NOTHING in that flag indicated that I wasn’t supposed to be able to deposit funds. To the contrary, the account flag said I was overseas and COULD make transactions from foreign countries if needed.

 

It took the credit union the better part of an hour to resolve this. In the entire time I’ve banked there the customer service has royally sucked! They act as if you should be honored to bank there and they never make mistakes.

 

In short: First South Bank Rocks. The NC State Employee’s Credit Union Sucks!

(back to work now)

 

2 comments:

  1. Hmm...in the 15 years I've been using the credit union, I've never had ONE negative experience. Not a bit. The people in my branch are generally a friendly bunch, and if you use the phone center, they're friendly too. I especially like they post the credits to your account before the debits on any given day...

    I will say that I at one time had a Wachovia account as well, and they were not nearly as professional. I've gotten promotional literature from many of the other banks in our area, and all the fine print gives me a headache. I don't know which one I'd choose if the Credit Union wasn't available to me.

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  2. Well, I'm glad SOMEONE has had a good experience with them. My experience with their staff has been with the attitude of "You want to bank more than we want you to bank here, so we really can treat you like shit and there's nothing you can do about it if you want to keep your 4.3% interest rate mutual fund account."

    Part of First South's (and a few other banks I know of) training is that the bank staff has to be familiar with each customer by face. They're required to get to now their customer's profiles, which I think is awesome.

    As far as Wachovia, they've moved to second place on my list of horrible banks after two bad experiences, one of which cost me 400.00 that took them 6 weeks to return to my account. They were worst, but I'm bumping them to second because NCSECU sucks on purpose.. it's their attitude. Wachovia just has poor banking policies. At least their people are friendly though.

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