Counting coins

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My bank, TDBank, is very good. Its rates are low, and its staff members are invariably friendly. (It’s one of the main reasons I transferred my account over from the expensive unfriendly Citizens Bank a few years ago.) Also, TDBank has many hidden advantages. For example: its foreign exchange rates are very low (perhaps because it’s based in Canada).

Also: it has a coin-counting machine in its lobby.

This is a huge advantage for people like me who hoard coins. I learned the habit from my parents, who hoarded them also; in my childhood, we spent many happy evenings counting and rolling coins.

But rolling coins is tedious. It’s so much easier to feed them into a coin-counting machine and take the resulting calculation to the cashier and get your money. (Every bit of it, mind you, not like CoinStar, which keeps 10% or more of it as a “fee.”)

The TDBank machine is set up for children. There’s an animated character on the viewscreen named “Penny,” who talks you through the whole process. “My goodness,” she says periodically, “you sure have saved up a lot of money!”

This is a little annoying, but there you are.

The other day, when I was running some coins through the machine, Penny stopped suddenly. “You’ve save up so much money,” she said, “that I’ve filled up my coin sack! An attendant will come help you shortly.”

And an attendant did. As she finished up, she turned to me and said (I thought): “Just touch your nose and you’ll resume.”

I thought she was joking, or that I’d misheard. So I touched my nose.

The attendant grimaced and pointed to the viewscreen. “Her nose,” she said. “Touch her nose.”

Ah. It all made sense suddenly.

Am I not a stupid funny old man?

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Customer service done right, and done wrong

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My Australian career idol, Attila Ovari, has posted several blogs recently about customer service. You can read one here, and the other here.

 

 

You’ve maybe read my various rants on the subject. The local grocery store is – not to exaggerate – about as service-oriented as a federal prison. My old bank (whose name rhymes with “Bitizens”) was even worse. They were generally indifferent, and occasionally genuinely rude.

 

 

So I quit them, and took my two dollars and seventeen cents, and opened an account at TD Bank, which only recently came to Rhode Island.

 

 

It was like the transition from black-and-white to color in “The Wizard of Oz.” The staff at TD Bank are friendly! They hold the door for me, and greet me! They give me free pens, and even dog biscuits! (Well, not for me. They’re dog-friendly, in any case.) The tellers and managers at the downtown Providence location, where I go maybe twice a week, are friendly and chatty without being oppressive or stupid.

 

 

Also, I should add, their fee structure is much more client-friendly than that at Bitizens. Before our trip to France, Partner did some checking and found that the dollar-to-Euro exchange rate (including fee) was much better at my bank than at his (he still banks at Bitizens!), so he had me change some money for him there. Then my friend Tab found out the same thing, and had me change some dollars to Canadian currency for him.

 

 

Okay. Good customer service, and better rates, and lower fees.

 

 

So Partner comes out of Bitizens chuckling the other day. “The teller kept chatting me up,” he said. “He called me by my first name, which he got from my deposit slip. And then he said: ‘You might be getting a call later. They may want to ask you about my customer service.’”

 

 

We had a good laugh about that. So now Bitizens is worried about its customer service, and is trying to emulate my bank!

 

 

Except that, once again, they’ve got the formula wrong.

 

 

This is Partner speaking:

 

 

“I can hardly wait. I hope they call me. I’ll give the teller high marks for being very friendly and sociable. I will also tell them that, when we were in Connecticut last week, I was using an out-of-system ATM and accidentally hit the “Check My Balance” button. It gave me my balance, all right. It also charged me three dollars for the privilege.”

 

 

How much do you think that electronic transaction actually cost the banks in question? Some fraction of a penny?

 

 

Partner has vowed that, as soon as TD Bank opens up a bank in our neighborhood, he’s transferring his account.

 

 

Hear that, Bitizens?

 

 

(No, you probably don’t.)

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Customer service: the flip side

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I have written before about bad customer service.  In my young-and-foolish days I used to put up with it, thinking that I was a poor humble sap and that the cashiers and tellers were treating me badly because I somehow deserved it.  As I’ve aged, however, I’ve gotten smarter and crankier.  I have actually made a couple of customer-service people burst into flames when I focus my anger onto them.

 

 

A TD Bank recently opened in downtown Providence.  I was curious, and went in for some casual transactions.  They have lollipops! They have dog biscuits! They open the door for you!  They’re almost invariably cheerful!  (I’ve seen one of the tellers looking a little melancholy once or twice, but she didn’t take out her bad feeling on me, and I felt sympathetic for her.)

 

 

So I decided to join the TD revolution.

 

 

I could not have done better.  The folks at my old bank (whose name begins with a CITI and ends with a ZENS) were snarky and unpleasant when I closed out my account. The customer-service representative (a football-hero type, beefy and bluff) tried to talk me out of my decision, until I pointed out to him that he’d kept me waiting for several minutes while he chatted and flirted with a couple of the bank’s other employees.  At this point he became rather chilly with me. 

 

 

I am deliriously happy with TD Bank.  They’re cheaper, for one thing; their fees are much lower than those at my previous bank.  And the staff are cheerful, and they actually make a point of being helpful.  If I see someone in the bank wearing a nametag, I can actually ask him/her a question, and he/she will actually answer it, fully and helpfully, with a smile. 

 

 

I think my head might explode with joy. 

 

 

Now: if they opened up a few more branches in Rhode Island – preferably up here on the East Side of Providence – my life would be complete.

 

 

(Can this be true? Can the world actually be getting better?)

 

 

(I doubt it.)

 

 

(But I’ll take whatever I can get.)

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