A few things can take a while to settle, even though there are certain procedures that provide a solution to avoid a long wait. End of march, I wanted to travel to my hometown on a public holiday. Before I got onto the train, I tried to withdraw some money from an ATM. However, the door-opener refused my card and hence I did not have access to the ATM itself. Since my train was leaving soon, I had to resort to the other nearest ATM, but there I had to pay a fee of 5 Euro since this ATM did not belong to my bank's network.
About a week later, I sent an email my assigned contact person at my bank. In this email I complained about the fee and asked for a refund since it the ATM was not accessible. Also I attached to that email a confirmation that I am still a student and thus to extend my student account there. About three weeks later and without getting any response, I sent an email reminder. And a little while later, the only reaction that I got was a letter telling me that my student status was expiring.
Just great. Apparently my emails have not been received or been ignored. So I prepared a letter with my complaint, attached a note from my university that I am still a student and threw this one into the mailbox of my bank. A week and a few days later, still no reaction, I decided to try to contact my bank through a third way: I left a message/complaint though the web-interface of my account there.
The next day I got a call from quality management. He settled my issue with the fee and promised to get in touch with my assigned contact person about this issue to find out what was going on. He even refunded me twice the original fee that I had to pay at that ATM because of the long wait that I had. I honestly have to say though, that I was more happy that he said that was doing a follow-up than getting more money back.
And apparently, this follow-up was done, because now looking at my account statement, I see yet another refund of that transaction fee. Of course I am happy about more money. Now I got a total refund of 15 Euro for an original transaction fee of 5 Euro. But I still have no explanation of what went wrong and I am not really confident that this will not happen again.
Now I am contemplating to write back that I got already a refund of the transaction and that the second refund can be returned, but that I would like to know what went wrong and how to avoid contacting problems in the future. On the other hand, I would like to keep the money of course. After all, I am just a poor student.
What would you do?
The joy of getting a bigger refund definitely pushed back the lack of confidence that I have with my bank. It is an easy pacifier. But also it simply addresses only the current situation and is relieving its symptoms. But I still have no idea of the cause and I do believe that getting in touch with me to resolve this issue would have created an even higher consumer satisfaction for me.
