> "Bank of America supervisor" implies a manager at a call centre.
Hahahaha, yep. And that's as far as you'll get.
I've worked at a call center that serviced a lot of big companies. Rest assured you will never, ever speak to an actual manager at a call center (call center managers aren't trained to interact with customers, they mostly do scheduling and deal with attendance policy). You'll get a "Level 2 rep" who's just another rep who has some authority to grant exceptions to policy in certain cases.
Also, if you call the corporate HQ and demand to speak to the president of the company, they'll route your call right back to that level 2 rep in the call center. Most companies go out of their way to ensure that the leadership is protected from the inevitable lunatic customers.
I made it to level 5 once with my bank when a merchant was ripping me off. It was the kind of thing where they could only promise a callback within the week because the person was generally busy not answering customer calls and didn't have anything to do with the call centre. That guy fixed the problem when everyone under him said they couldn't.
If it wasn't a bank, I would say forget about this approach. But based on my own limited experience, I have this belief that retail banks are nowhere near as atrocious as PayPal or your typical telecom or insurance company.
Even if escalation through customer-facing channels didn't pan out, I guess I would like to see more than a public exposé on a blog and YouTube from someone who "is a long-time advocate of privacy and the conservation of the personal realm" and who previously was involved with Mt. Gox. There is no indication that they exhausted all possible avenues before going public with the information, and I'm quite sure there's more to do than simply give up once you reach level 2.
It seems like the author, thieves, and a fraction of a percent of BoA customers are the only ones who benefit from this. His actual core business at the moment is based on safeguarding people's privacy; this kind of thing only makes me want to run far far away.
> I made it to level 5 once with my bank when a merchant was ripping me off.
Eh, in all reality your 'level 5' is likely the other level 2 sitting next to the 'level 4' (who was also a level 2) you spoke to. I know this from experience, there's not a ton of professionalism when everyone is pulling down < $10 an hour. It might've been the one level 2 that knew more than the others. It's really level 2 reps all the way down.
No, it was a guy in a private office who was VP something or other for the west coast, but I had to escalate several times to reach him. Maybe I just have a good bank.
That's entirely possible, the call center where I worked was mostly tech companies (HP, Adobe, Autodesk, etc etc). I'm guessing if you were with a smaller bank you'd get less factory farm-type service.
I managed to hit my bank's internal security team this one time. Pretty cool to chat to them at the time although they mentioned as little as humanly possible about their policies for obvious reasons :)
My account basically got itself into an invalid state where I couldn't verify using my pin or log in online. Must have slipped through the cracks in business logic somewhere because I combined credit and debit onto a single card and created a 6 number PIN. Called customer service, got escalated to higher level, then a few hours later called by someone from the internal team.. which worried me slightly.. but was fine in the end.
Hahahaha, yep. And that's as far as you'll get.
I've worked at a call center that serviced a lot of big companies. Rest assured you will never, ever speak to an actual manager at a call center (call center managers aren't trained to interact with customers, they mostly do scheduling and deal with attendance policy). You'll get a "Level 2 rep" who's just another rep who has some authority to grant exceptions to policy in certain cases.
Also, if you call the corporate HQ and demand to speak to the president of the company, they'll route your call right back to that level 2 rep in the call center. Most companies go out of their way to ensure that the leadership is protected from the inevitable lunatic customers.