I’ve been writing on a theme for the last few blogs: the mistakes that credit card companies make. I’ve categorized them into three types: 1) non-fulfillment errors, 2) wrong info given, and 3) wrong action taken. Of course there are always those errors made by individual agents, based upon their own misperceptions, but that is a another can of worms related to the turnover in the call center industry due to low pay.

In regard to the second category “wrong info given” this, typically, occurs via a letter generated by computer program to you, the credit card account holder. The misinformation about your account is likely to ‘only’ cause frustration or nuisance and, because it’s only you who received information that’s wrong, it’s likely to be more of an annoyance than a danger to your finances.

Far more dangerous is when a credit card company reports misinformation to a third party like a credit bureau. Credit card companies will seldom inform you about such reporting because they are communicating with the credit bureaus all the time.

Yet this mistake can pose a real danger to a your financial well-being if your credit card company makes this kind of blunder in the closing of an inactive account. So you need to know how and when to check for it. [Read more →]

Credit card company foul-ups can affect your credit score. Sadly, the credit card company that I work for is a coalmine of  misinformation. In the years that I’ve been working there, I’ve spoken with but a sampling of the millions of customers  who receive letters that are just plain wrong.

Sending out bad information falls under the second category of credit card company mistakes that I discussed in my July 24th post “Credit Card Blunders.”

These mistakes – in which a customer receives the wrong information via a letter generated by a software program - vary considerably in how serious they are.

For the very worst of these errors, the consequences of acting on bad information provided by a credit card company can be very costly.  In some cases, however, it is just the ‘not knowing’ about the error that is maddening to the customer.

The main consequence of the error I’m going to discuss today is extreme annoyance because the customer may need to go through a lot of hassle to correct something that is in no way his fault.

The error I’m talking about is when misinformation is reported to credit bureaus.  [Read more →]

Credit card companies make, literally, millions of mistakes with customers accounts. So over my next few blogs I’m going to give you some information about the assortment of errors that can occur.

I’ve struggled to find some way to classify and organize these “foul-ups” to make them easier to understand. I considered classifying the errors by cause and putting all mistakes made by credit card agents under one category, those caused by bad technology in another, and so forth.

But, truthfully, there have been blunders made on customer accounts, the cause for which is hard to pin down.

So while I will clearly try to identify the cause of a particular mistake when I can do so, I see no real value in trying to organize tips in that way. I’ve decided, instead, to put all credit card company errors in one of these three general groups: [Read more →]