How to Win Enemies and Drive Away Customers (Customer Service)

This top ten list is dedicated to all the people at Liberty Bank of Utah that we worked with for the last two years. Without your lack of customer service towards us this list would never have been possible. All items in this list are inspired by actual events that took place while working with Liberty Bank. If you have had trouble with Liberty Bank or any other bank please feel free to comment on this post or email us at nightmare@libertybankstory.com.

  1. Tell your customers that all further requests to fix your mistakes have to be submitted in writing. (We were not allowed to call Liberty Bank after they got our payments, statements, and accounts wrong month after month after month. They must have gotten tired of us pointing out how incompetent they were.)
  2. Promise reply mail to those requests in writing within 30 days and never actually respond.
  3. Tell your customers that you don’t care if they leave. (I think that after dealing with Liberty Bank as a mortgage company that they must never have serviced a loan before mine. They told us countless times that they didn’t care if we left. They offered to pay closing costs if we refinanced with them so they could sell our note to someone else. We would have loved to refinance with anyone but Liberty Bank.)
  4. Tell your customers that you are having a party now that they have left. (We called to get a copy of our last few months statements so we could double check their work and they refused to send them to us. Not only is this possibly against the law, I think they are trying to hide something. They also told me that they didn’t care and that they were having a party now that we were gone.)
  5. Tell your customers two weeks after the bill due date that they owe money to Allstate for home owners insurance, demand payment immediately, and then wonder why this is a problem.
  6. After demanding payment for the home owners insurance bill, tell your customers that you found out that they have plenty of money in escrow and offer to reduce monthly payments for the rest of the year to make up for it. (I think they did their books or something and found our money after sending us these nasty letters demanding payment.)
  7. At closing, instead of sending a check for the money your customer paid into the escrow account as stated in the closing documents, apply the escrow amount to the principle of the loan and then refuse to document this action. (When we called to ask what was happening with our escrow account after our refinance we were told “Well, I’m pretty new and I’m not familiar with payoffs, but the way I did it was to apply your escrow amount to the principal of your first mortgage. I don’t see how sending you a check for the escrow account is any different than that.” Well, for one, applying it to principal just gives the money to our new lender, sending us a check puts the money that is ours for paying taxes and insurance back in our savings account earning interest.)
  8. Hang up on your customer when they call up and say “Hi, this is (your customer). I have a quick question for you”.
  9. Send your customers to closing 4 times after: getting the property address wrong (meaning a completely different house in a different city), misspelling their names, losing sensitive documents, allocating funds wrong, etc.
  10. During your customer’s application process and the weeks leading up to the loan closing date, don’t return phone calls to answer questions or give progress reports. (We should have gotten a hint during the weeks leading up to the closing on our loan that this was how the rest of our professional relationship with Liberty Bank was going to be. Too bad we have so much faith in people. We would have turned around and run if we thought Liberty Bank was going to service our loan for the next two years. Our favorite comment came just after closing when we met with the bank president to straighten out one missing loan document. He said “We are going out on a limb to buy this house for you.” Well, excuse me, but we are not a limb with A+ credit for both of us and plenty of cash reserves, and it’s not your house, our names are on the title. We own the house and we will always own this house as long as we pay our bills on time.)