banks

This blog claims to contain an adulterated version of my private life, with bits missing and others added, primarily chosen to make a good story. No post is entirely made up, but none is free from elements of the spectrum between fiction and lies either. Take the post, ten days ago, about bike hire and supercars. The cars were clamped at Harrods and the cruisers can be picked up all over town, that much was true. But to me the bikes are still off-limits because I don't have a subscription yet.

This failure to ride is not my fault. Even before the service started, I was signed up on the web and tried valiantly to secure a subscription good for the year. But my debit card wasn't accepted and my credit card rejected. Multiple time, on consecutive days. It didn't make sense. I used the card in the store; there's nothing wrong with it. Trying for the fifth time, I was given a telephone number to call. Maybe the friendly folks at the call center could help me out.

I can't say they didn't try. They kept me on the phone for half an hours, trying to run my card through their system until their system crashed. When they called me back a while later they tried some more, but still failed. It sounded like a problem with the card – though, as I said, the card works in stores.

When I said earlier that there was nothing wrong with the card, I was lying. It's all but useless. In contrast to the US, it's rather difficult to get a credit card in the UK, and the first one one gets is usually rubbish. Mine has a credit limit of about a week's pay. I can't even rent a car with it because the deposit is beyond the limit. I tried to extend the limit online but was refused, which aggravated me enough to consider ditching the card altogether.

Thus I called the credit card customer service number, which presented me, after some number wrangling and obscure security questions, with an option I couldn't refuse. "If you want to close your account, press 3." By that time I had calmed down and only wanted to pay for my cycle hire membership and extend my credit limit, but it seemed to me that choosing option 3 would convey a sense of seriousness and urgency that wouldn't go unnoticed.

And so it happened. In less than a minute, I was talking to an actual person. Suffused by the anticipation of victory, I complained in a dramatic voice that I hadn't been happy with the card lately. Thinking my claimed dissatisfaction would elicit commercial interest, I asked for the account to be closed. After the inevitable, "What's wrong? I'm sure we can figure something out", I would then list my grievances.

That was my strategy, anyway, but the response I got stopped me dead in my tracks and left me speechless. "I see you're carrying a balance. How do you want to pay that off?", was the instantaneous reply. Customer retention is apparently not a core business value of Santander, the bank that issued my card.

I was shocked, mostly because I had seen the other extreme after leaving the US. I had already lived in France for a good year when I decided to drop my United Gold card because it didn't make sense to pay sixty bucks a year for a card I hardly ever used. The person I talked to when I wanted to close that account suggested, all salesman: "Why don't you change over to our Classic card, which is free?" He didn't mind that I lived in France and had no income in the US; he just wanted me to use his card and not a competitor's.

I still have that card and treasure it highly. The other day, its limit was raised to just a nick over ten grand. It's great for renting a car and has been a life safer on more than one occasion, and maybe it will get me onto the blue bikes as well, despite a dwindling balance on my American checking account and ridiculous currency exchange fees.