Chase Customer Support is awful; Don't even know how to use their system

[Anonymous]

It was just a terrible experience with Chase Support. Apologies in advance for the long story.

I received the card about a week ago. I live in the U.S. territory (this was not a problem for them, they accepted my application and sent me a card).

The app is of course and the website looks pretty backward, but it seems to do the job (although it is worth noting that in the middle of the day all pending transactions can disappear for several hours from the app, it's midnight ET but here it's just afternoon; a very strange feeling for the 21st century).

But when I tried to add a card to my Wallet (to use for Apple Pay), a real nightmare began.

I went to the Apple Pay section in their app and the only thing I see: "You don't have any eligible cards to add right now. Check back later or try adding your card directly to Apple Pay."
How is this possible? No one can answer the question of what this means and why. Why does the application not prompt me to add a card to my wallet?
It feels like someone from heaven wrote a system for this bank and no one there knows how it works.

Okay. I am trying to add a card by entering all data in Wallet. The card has been added, but to complete it asks to enter a code from a text message. It was the only option to finish confirmation.
Already here I felt that everything would be bad. Even banks with physical branches here having problems sending text messages to numbers of our local carriers (the funny thing here is that this is not a very big problem for my foreign European bank, which can send me text messages and information about my transactions to any country, but apparently for U.S. banks this is a serious challenge to just be able to serve domestic carriers).

But when I added my Discover Card it just offer me two options: get code with text message or just email.

So of course I didn't get any texts from them. I started calling Chase support. I've been doing this for several days for hours. Often they did not understand what I wanted, often they had the screams of children and dogs in the background, sometimes it's just silence or poor connection quality (not on my part, since the automatic system and music were heard well), but the worst thing is that they did not know how to solve this problem. They were telling me something like: "the system does not offer me any options", "I do not know how to open/verify your profile", "try to call tomorrow, there is some problem".

I tried to use Secure message center (no even chat in banking app?) but the general answer was: "We can't solve it here, please call us".

On Friday the guy gave me the phone number of the Online Banking Team (1-877-283-5940) to help me at least avoid listening to endless messages from an automated system about how they are overloaded and that I should use automated services (I would be glad to).

I called this number on Saturday and the lady literally told me that she could not open my profile and the only way for me to solve this problem was to come several thousand miles away to their nearest branch. How do you issue cards here if you cannot service them?
She was unable to answer this question. Why she can’t do anything, she doesn’t know either.

I am generally surprised by this feature in Chase employees as they asked me to help them with their system: "Sorry. I'm clicking here but I don't see anything." They don't have any method to reach out to their technical team and ask them. I was simply confronted with the fact that "we do not know why this is happening".

After this conversation, I decided to try to investigate the problem again by myself (I'm not going to fly a thousand miles to activate Apple Pay). I went to my profile and changed the settings of my phone. I put the same phone number but checked the box that this is an international number, not a U.S. number.

After that, I removed the card from the Wallet and tried to add it again.
What happened? This offered me several activation methods, including emailing me a code. Everything took less than a minute.
The funny thing is that after that I called them again and the guy denied that the wallet could be activated in any other way besides text messaging.

I may be unlucky, but I did not understand why many consider this support to be one of the best among American banks. This is not a single bad employee problem. No one could advise me to do one simple action, although I repeated to them many times that I suspect there is a problem with the phone number and a different confirmation method should be used.

I hope this information will help at least someone. It seems that no one is going to teach employees how to activate Apple Pay for thousands of customers on U.S. territories. 

[fatcomic]

I'm glad you figured it out, sometimes that is the best solution.   

However, I'm sure this is a problem for a small percentage of their customers and the issue probably comes up so infrequently that their training department or resources doesn't even address the issue.   Does that make it awful customer service?  I mean they're not Chick-fil-a but still far from awful.  

[Anonymous]

Just because programmers took care of this niche scenario doesn't mean that training manuals for customer service and tech support cover it unfortunately. Training is expensive and long term retention of knowledge tends to favor a less is more approach so most companies only train for the most common scenarios. There are far more important things that those reps would have been able to help with for sure than Apple Pay. 

[Anonymous]

Right, but, IMO, a little bit too much cutting Chase slack.  OPs point is that the card is marketed in these territories (not just a small town in middleofnowhereville), and adding to a mobile wallet really isn't that much of a niche use-case.   

 Some posters here have previously complained about the pattern: Person X complains about something, and person Y says "Oh, that's not important, don't worry about it" and Person X has to explain that it really is important to them.

Same here, OP wanted to add the card to a wallet, CSRs weren't helpful and OP, luckily, was able to find a solution by themselves.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Right, but, IMO, a little bit too much cutting Chase slack.  OPs point is that the card is marketed in these territories (not just a small town in middleofnowhereville), and adding to a mobile wallet really isn't that much of a niche use-case.   

 Some posters here have previously complained about the pattern: Person X complains about something, and person Y says "Oh, that's not important, don't worry about it" and Person X has to explain that it really is important to them.

Same here, OP wanted to add the card to a wallet, CSRs weren't helpful and OP, luckily, was able to find a solution by themselves.

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Well I've never been to Guam so I can't say for certain but I highly doubt that Chase is doing heavy marketing in the territories seeing how the Chase website doesn't show any branches and more that they are just allowing applications from them. Now if it was PenFed, I wouldn't give them any slack, because they do have a presence in Guam, but this certainly seems like a situation that qualifies for niche status. 

[Anonymous]

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@fatcomic wrote:

I'm glad you figured it out, sometimes that is the best solution.   

However, I'm sure this is a problem for a small percentage of their customers and the issue probably comes up so infrequently that their training department or resources doesn't even address the issue.   Does that make it awful customer service?  I mean they're not Chick-fil-a but still far from awful.  

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I cannot fully agree here.

I agree that first line support specialists cannot know everything and generally do not have much technical and geographic knowledge.

But in general, what is this strange position for an employee: "The system does not show me anything" or "The system does not allow me to open your profile." I said that I understand that this is not their direct fault, but they can message or make an ticket to the technical department. Or switch me to a more technically qualified person. 

This is how it should work. At my foreign bank, I also sometimes had difficult technical problems when the card was rejected here, but after creating ticket they were even able to figure out that this was due to the fact that the machine was using the old contactless payment method with involving magnetic stripe emulation, which is not considered secure. 

They can even answer me what MCC (Merchant category code) has been sent for declined transactions to understand what cashback I can get. But it seems that if I ask this question here, then I will have to spend the next 5 minutes explaining what is MCC, after which I will still be told that "I do not know where to look for it for declined transactions".

The bottom line here is that it is normal that they do not personally know all kind of situations and solutions, but this should be included in their documents where they can search for it, or they should be able to contact a more advanced specialist for these questions.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Just because programmers took care of this niche scenario doesn't mean that training manuals for customer service and tech support cover it unfortunately. Training is expensive and long term retention of knowledge tends to favor a less is more approach so most companies only train for the most common scenarios. There are far more important things that those reps would have been able to help with for sure than Apple Pay. 

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I have already answered above about the training of support line specialists, but I also want to address the question of the technical side.

"programmers took care of this niche scenario".

To be honest, even from a technical point of view, this is a bad solution that created all these problems.

Two examples.

My friend has a debit card from First Hawaian Bank. As I understand it, when he added it to Apple Pay they also cannot send the activation code to his phone number. 

But Wallet immediately told him that in order to complete the confirmation, he would need to call a special line for activating mobile wallets, where in a couple of minutes after a few questions they were able to do all the work.

Another example with my Disover card. They always have problems with my phone number too, but they always offer to email me the code. I don't have to check any settings in the profile, but all menus have this choice (include Apple Pay activation).

Why this confusing scenario was invented here is unclear to me.

Why do I have to mark that my number is international in the settings to get this option?

Most importantly, how should I know that my number is international, if it belongs to the territory of the United States, and even after a direct question in support, they answered me that they do not believe that there problem with my number.

Why should a ccustomer ever make this decision and tell bank if his number is domestic or international? The bank already has a phone number. They clearly see if this number belongs to some state, territory or other country. This idea is already embedded in the phone number system and this choice seems meaningless.

I just can't know if they have an SMS exhange with my carrier or not.

If the problem was initially solved at a technical level, then there would be no need to train support line specialists for this.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

Just because programmers took care of this niche scenario doesn't mean that training manuals for customer service and tech support cover it unfortunately. Training is expensive and long term retention of knowledge tends to favor a less is more approach so most companies only train for the most common scenarios. There are far more important things that those reps would have been able to help with for sure than Apple Pay. 

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I have already answered above about the training of support line specialists, but I also want to address the question of the technical side.

"programmers took care of this niche scenario".

To be honest, even from a technical point of view, this is a bad solution that created all these problems.

Two examples.

My friend has a debit card from First Hawaian Bank. As I understand it, when he added it to Apple Pay they also cannot send the activation code to his phone number. 

But Wallet immediately told him that in order to complete the confirmation, he would need to call a special line for activating mobile wallets, where in a couple of minutes after a few questions they were able to do all the work.

Another example with my Disover card. They always have problems with my phone number too, but they always offer to email me the code. I don't have to check any settings in the profile, but all menus have this choice (include Apple Pay activation).

Why this confusing scenario was invented here is unclear to me.

Why do I have to mark that my number is international in the settings to get this option?

Most importantly, how should I know that my number is international, if it belongs to the territory of the United States, and even after a direct question in support, they answered me that they do not believe that there problem with my number.

Why should a ccustomer ever make this decision and tell bank if his number is domestic or international? The bank already has a phone number. They clearly see if this number belongs to some state, territory or other country. This idea is already embedded in the phone number system and this choice seems meaningless.

I just can't know if they have an SMS exhange with my carrier or not.

If the problem was initially solved at a technical level, then there would be no need to train support line specialists for this.

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Honestly it's probably something that they added after they realized there was an issue but you are correct that there are other ways they could have handled it. My guess is that there is some sort of system compatibility issue at fault here and the toggle is a messy workaround. That would seem to suggest to me that the issue isn't common enough for them to devote any further resources to it. 

What irks me is that banks and CUs still rely on text message authentication at all rather than TOTP. It's honestly hilarious that you have to get an insecure SMS message to be able to set up a secure tokenized card in Wallet because they won't offer TOTP tokens as a more secure way to set it up to begin with. 

[Anonymous]

What irks me is that banks and CUs still rely on text message authentication at all rather than TOTP. It's honestly hilarious that you have to get an insecure SMS message to be able to set up a secure tokenized card in Wallet because they won't offer TOTP tokens as a more secure way to set it up to begin with. 

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Oh yeah. Especially if we condier common scenarion with SIM swap scam. Not sure U.S. banks tracking this at all. The last time I replaced the SIM, my European bank sent me a message that they found a replacement SIM on my number and I need to contact them to continue receiving text messages from them.

When I added a card to Apple Pay here, they give me a choice to send a code via push in their app or SMS (oh yes, they can send code even to numbers in U.S. territories even though they don't issue cards for U.S. citizens at all). 

Phone calls are another security and conviniece issue. I can call the bank directly from my mobile app. It is secure (another level of encryption), convinient (higher quality), free (even if I am in another country I don't need to pay international fees and problems are common with cards when you aboard). And they also easy can authenticate me because I am calling from app where I am already authorized (it is well known that the outgoing number is easy to forge).

But I think that this is is already too much for Chase and another banks, which has not even implemented chat in their app, but continues to use stone age "secure messages" which "disappear in 90 days".

In U.S. at the moment probably only Apple with their Apple Card has been able to come close to some 21st century user experience (despite other limitations).

[Anonymous]

Before I got my first statement from Chase, I was wondering if they would use the transaction (authorisation) date or post date for history of transactions.

As it turned out, both options were wrong, and they use something absurd in between.

They list the authorization date for each transaction, but sort them by post date which is not listed anywhere on the statement.

As a result, the history of transactions may look like this:

04/30
05/02
04/30

05/07
05/09
05/07
05/08

A person far from the banking industry can suffer for a long time wondering what is the reason for this mess.

If you show the date of the transaction, then sort by that date. If you show a post date, then sort by that date. But how could Chase come up with such a strange solution?

In the best case, it would be good to specify both dates on statement, but the post date makes even more sense for statement as it is something they use for internest calculation. In this case, it will be impossible to manually check how they calculated the interest by looking at this statement.

I do not even mention that some parts of the electronic statement has low quality, as if it was scanned from paper.

Fo sure I don't want to create a new topic for this, and in general I believe that this problem stems from the above, when the bank does not want to seriously invest in its technical infrastructure, believing that if it somehow works somehow, then it is unnecessary to touch it.