I have an upcoming payment due with my car insurance company, and I wanted to use my Bank of America BillPay service to take care of it. However, when I tried to add my car insurance to the BillPay online, I had a lot of trouble. I don't know if it's the website or if I am doing something wrong, so I figured the best thing I could do is call and talk to someone. This way I could just get the problem dealt with because I had enough other tasks to take care of this month.
Bank of America no doubt gets a lot of phone calls from customers daily, but I called later in the evening, hoping this would be a quieter time than during the day. I also called the BillPay line directly so that I wouldn't have to contend with all of the general questions the banking institute might get. Despite this, I wasn't able to talk to someone, which was actually unsettling and made me a little angry. Next time I am in a physical branch of the bank, I will probably mention the bad experience I had on the phone.
When I called, an automated assistant said, "Thank you for calling Bank of America BillPay. How may I assist you today? You can say things like 'Billpay,' 'add a new payee to Billpay,' or 'online bank account.'" I responded with the command, "Add a new payee to Billpay." The voice assistant then said, "To better assist you, please have your account information available. I can hold for up to one minute. When you are ready to continue, please press any number."
I pressed a random key, and it asked me to enter my checking account number. I was driving and didn't have that readily accessible since I expected to be on hold first, so I said no. It then said, "Please wait while I transfer your call to a customer service representative." It was only a minute and a half so far, so I was actually impressed that I had already gotten through to the hold line. However, a new voice assistant picked up and said, "Thank you for calling. We are sorry, but all agents are busy serving other customers. Please try your call later today."
After that short speech, it hung up on me, leaving me flabbergasted. I couldn't believe that was their idea of customer service, but I wasn't going to waste my time again. I'll just stop in at the bank at some point.