My Message to Citibank

Wow, I just realized I haven't posted anything in almost two months. I'm such a lame blogger. Not that I really give a shit about that. But maybe I should try to do a little better there. I've just been so damn busy. But anyways, here is an unacceptable rant. It was deemed unacceptable by Citibank. Apparently if you want to bitch them out, you must limit it to 20 lines, what ever a "line" is.

But while setting up my monthly payment it just started to fly all over me that they don't have automatic monthly minimum payments to set up. So I tried to tell them about it. But they wouldn't have it, I guess they don't have the time. Assuming whoever might read this does, here it is:

Dear Sirs: // <-- I actually didn't bother with a salutation. While I am currently enjoying a very low interest rate on the balance that I owe on my CitiBank account, I do feel compelled to register a complaint. This is the only credit card that I have which does not provide a means for either a set amount to be paid each month automatically, or for the minimum payment to be paid automatically. Just so you know, I am becoming ever more and more unsatisfied as a credit card user and have started using my newly acquired, interest-bearing(!) debit card from ING for almost all of my monthly expenses. I don't have to worry about changing terms, payment dates, whether or not I have to pay by the payment date or at least a couple of days before. I am starting to find it hard to believe that the only reason Citibank does not provide the functionality to at least schedule payments more than one month into the future, like Chase does, or automatically schedule the minimum payment to be made, as I get with Bank of America or any affiliate of CheckFree, is that they want customers to occasionally forget to make their online payments so that they can ding them a fee. I plan on having this debt paid off in less than one year. If you have not added this feature to your website within that time, it will factor heavily on whether or not I will keep this account open, and continue to do business with CitiBank. I'm sure that this will little communique will have little influence on your decision to do so when you are probably making so much money with those dings, and the automatic rate increases that would most certainly come from it. Just be aware that I'm sick of the ever changing service agreements, I'm sick that you people would engage in Universal Default and penalize someone for what could be the accounting mistake of a competitor at the expense of a customer, I'm sick of online account management that I feel doesn't help me do the single most important thing I want to do, which is to pay my bill on time, aka pay you people money I owe you. Personally, I don't put roadblocks on people trying to pay me what they owe me. But for all I know doing the opposite is a good a way to run a credit card business, but it does seem counter intuitive. The bean counters might even have some formula as to what level you can make your customers unhappy without affecting your bottom line. But for what its worth, you are probably going to lose this one or at the very least maintain an empty account, no big deal I'm sure.

I worked on that particular composition and they were just not interested. Oh well, at least I know now how much they actually care about this particular customer. Somewhat less than 20 lines of text. Oh man, I can't wait to pay those usurers off.

[Update] My mistake. They replied and I was all upset for nothing. They DO have AutoPay. They just apparently don't want anyone to use it, since they don't display it anywhere in my account settings or like in the "Pay Bill" Section. They might now want you to know this if you are a CitiBank customer, but if you know that their system is called "AutoPay", and you do a search in their Online Answers section for that word you can get some information about it. They are going to mail me a form to fill out, mail it (the old fashion kind) back to them, have some buffoon type my application into the internets and in a month or two I should have AutoPay set up. Ain't the wired up, electronic information age great? This is the same level of service that I would have expected in 1990. Ain't the wired up, electronic information age great?