Ally Update: Ally Responds
Over lunch I received a call from Ally’s executive resolutions department. The woman I spoke to was extremely apologetic, but professional, and promised to look into the situation. She called a few minutes later to clarify some information, and as soon as I finish this sandwich, I’ll be back in touch. Kudos to their resolutions department for a quick response. Let’s see how this plays out.
Ally Update: Harnessing Twitter to Get Ally’s Attention
I sent a tweet to @AllyBank earlier saying:
Having a lot of problems with @AllyBank not helping to resolve an issue of mine. Really disappointed, I expected more.
About an hour later, I received two tweets from @AllyCare. They’re listed here:
@hirejameson Saw your tweet, Jameson, and we forwarded to Customer Care. Hopefully we can get you squared away. Sorry for any inconvenience!
@hirejameson Hey Jameson, @allybank sent your tweet our way, someone from our @allycare team will be in touch shortly.
So that’s where things stand at the moment. It’s been about ten minutes without anything further, but it’d be unreasonable to expect something so quickly. Kudos to their social media team for being on the ball.
A Missing Paycheck and Ally’s Lapse in Customer Service
I started working for my current employer about a month ago. When I enrolled in direct deposit, I decided to take a chance and deposit my paychecks in my Ally checking account. It made sense to me: Ally refunds all ATM fees, and I can earn 0.5% in interest every month on my account balance. Not a lot, but better than nothing.
The first check came, like they always do, directly to me. The second check, as you would expect, was scheduled to drop into my Ally account directly on pay day. Imagine my surprise, then, when I woke up and didn’t see it land in my account.
I discussed the situation with the payroll person in my office. After some investigation, we realized that someone at my company’s bank or at ADP (who distributes payroll; my money is on them) neglected to include the first digit of my account number to the deposit information. Let me take a moment here to recognize that at this point, Ally is totally innocent. It’s after this where I get frustrated.
My company’s bank tells our payroll person that when this happens, typically our bank (“Bank A” for ease of reading) will call the bank where the error has occurred (in this case, Ally) and the two banks would hash out the issue. Not so, it seems, with Ally. Instead of working through the issue, Ally refuses to discuss the transaction. Did it drop into someone else’s account? Is the deposit sitting in some suspended state? We don’t know.
Bank A’s rep recommended that I call Ally, since as the accountholder, perhaps they’ll be more forthcoming with me. When I called, I declined an opportunity to take a survey at the end of my interaction with the customer service rep, which I really wish I hadn’t. I explained to her my situation, to which she responded, and this isn’t paraphrasing, “What do you want me to do about it?”. I think the answer’s pretty obvious: I want you to help me. Tell me if my money is in account, tell me if it’s floating in some limbo between Bank A and you. At the very least, don’t give me attitude.
I was then put on hold. After a few minutes, I was told that my information was passed to “the other department” and that they’d call back. That was two hours ago. Since then, we’ve heard from Bank A that Ally refuses to discuss the situation with them.
I realize that this entire situation began as a result of careless data entry on the part of someone not associated with Ally, but when there is an issue involving my money, it’d be nice to know that Ally has my back. They don’t – or at least they’re not making it seem like they do.
I’ll add updates as the situation unfolds. My intention isn’t to bash Ally, it’s to document the problem and their response so other people who have similar issues have an idea of what to expect.
O’Guinn.com – A New Beginning
Michael Halbrook bought me my first domain, oguinnicus.com, when I was still in high school. It was a pretty big mistake on his part. What I didn’t realize at the time was that although Mike had provided the domain and hosting, he wasn’t my personal graphic designer and programmer. I spent hours drawing up what I wanted my site to look like, scanned it and emailed it to Mike, and when it wasn’t quite what I asked for, I hounded him with countless follow-up emails asking for changes.
It was actually Mike’s desire to be left alone that made me want to learn HTML. Fine, I thought. If Mike won’t build the site I want (I mean seriously, I had asked for video intros and photo galleries), then I’d just have to do it myself. I bought an HTML book and built my first “Hello World!” site.
For a time, I thought about being a web designer. I’d sit at home and build six different versions of my homepage and then use ColdFusion to randomly generate which showed to one of the three users I’d get every month. But when I got to college and realized that there were people out there who could code circles around me, I gave up thinking I was this prodigious überprogrammer. It was the beginning of the end of my web development days. … Continue Reading