Stop reading the Mindless Support Script. Just STOP.

Customer support is a tough job, and it is hard to provide customer support that doesn’t make most customers scream as they run for the exits.

Given this, you would think that companies investing in customer support would be more intentional about providing their customer support staff with real answers and tools that empower them to … ya know … actually support customers.

I recently had a series of maddening encounters with Ally Bank, which (to be fair) usually delivers a pretty good support experience. Not so this time around.

I contacted them because some subscription payments that have been functioning great for years suddenly stopped working. These payments are tied to my checking debit card, so I quickly verified that the debit card expiration date was valid and that funds are (and have been) in that account. All good.

My first contact was via the bank’s chat app. That person looked through my account history and agreed with my observation that these charges had been working fine for months (3+ years, actually). She then said something about there being a “fraud hold” associated with the latest transaction attempts. She could not explain that further, but when I pressed her, she said there was really nothing she could do about it because the “fraud” flags were coming from the MasterCard payment network processing the bank’s debit card transactions.

I then called the customer service number, and I received almost the same nonsensical explanation. In fact, it was obvious that the two reps were reciting the same set of words to “explain” situations that probably fit into this general problem area. This rep repeated the claim that the bank could do nothing about making these transactions work, so I demanded to speak to a supervisor. (If this is sounding familiar, let’s pause for a shared sigh/eye-roll.)

The supervisor repeated the same basic answer, but she used a slightly different set of words, and she had that I-know-how-to-handle-escalation calmness. Alas, she then repeated that the bank is helpless to actually resolve this problem, stating that there is no way for them to contact the payment network (MasterCard) to figure out why this “fraud” flag is appearing or make it stop.

What should be obvious by now is that this customer support team is not equipped or empowered to actually solve this problem. I would like to think that I would be less aggravated by that if they could have just told me “I am not allowed help you with this” during the first encounter, but the bigger (scary) picture is this:

If Ally Bank suddenly cannot accurately settle day-to-day transactions, are they the next mid-sized bank to fail?

Questions like this are the chilling result of reading the mindless support script. Just stop.