My wife just received a new Bank of America debit card and managed to persuade me to activate the card by calling the number on the sticker. In the past, this was usually a simple and painless procedure: enter the card number, the expiration date, and the last 4 digits of the SSN, and you were all set. But this time, I almost couldn’t believe my ears. While the activation was supposedly being processed, I had to endure 4 lengthy and annoying advertisements for credit reports and similar services, before I finally got the confirmation that the activation was successfully completed. After each ad, I was given the option to press “1” to take advantage of the “offer”, but I was never given an option to skip further ads. Overall the call probably took about 5 minutes…
This is an absolutely shameless and rude way to treat your customers. It is one thing to place ads like this on your website or on paper statements, but forcing loyal customers to sit through several minutes worth of this crap is simply unacceptable.