Subject: Customer Service Experience involving Checkfree
I have been helping my 76 year old non-computer mom (on the other side of the country from me) use Quicken and Checkfree over the last few years and every once in a while things get out of whack. She has stayed fiercely determined to survive the computer glitches we face and I try to help by remote control. Here is the latest.
She has had a relationship directly with Checkfree for several years, transmitting her payments out of Quicken through Compuserve (not the internet) to National City Bank, paying $9.95 per month to Checkfree. We set up an online banking relationship with SunTrust bank for her, and the troubles began. The payments she made through her SunTrust account started going to the wrong vendors. The account numbers and amounts were as she had transmitted, the payees and their addresses were to the wrong vendors. She sent $5k to the newspaper delivery guy, $12k to AT&T, etc. Everyone called her and said there must have been some mistake and sent her the checks back, except AT&T. AT&T cashed the check even though the account number did not match anything they could understand and then said it would take 10 days to refund the money.
We started with SunTrust customer service and they could not help. Then Checkfree and they said she was not using them any more so they could not help (they were looking only at her direct relationship and could not or did not see her SunTrust on their computer. They sent her to Intuit, no help there. We tried SunTrust again, they recommended we delete all of the payees in her Quicken and re-enter new vendors. I she had too many payees and that deleting SunTrust would be much easier, they were not too concerned about this. They transferred me back to Checkfree and after going from Technical Support at Checkfree (no help) to Customer Service at Checkfree (no help) I was told I could only get help from SunTrust because the Checkfree representatives could not see into the SunTrust account on their computers (Genesis?)!!
Finally, after pushing and pushing we ended up with someone at SunTrust who had a good understanding of Quicken and Checkfree and helped me determine what happened. We extracted a log file of the payment transmissions and looked at the data. It's like a payee2k problem. The SunTrust system chose "Merchant Number" 1 for the first "non-standard" payee (one that was not already on their system). And so on, Merchant Number 2 for the next one. This resulted in duplicating the Merchant Numbers already in Quicken for the National City account. Quicken transmitted the account number, amount and merchant number for the payments ordered and they went to the wrong merchants (payees).
No one seemed to troubled by this, except us. What a huge hassle. My mom wants to go back to writing the checks herself and licking the stamps. I do not blame her.
It seems to me this is a Checkfree problem, no one else's. Maybe Intuit is also responsible, but Checkfree should have prevented it anyway. I am still shocked that is could happen. The solution for us is to first add new vendors in QUicken for all the ones with low merchant numbers (duplicates), then delete the old ones. I can live with this and will get it done. How can Checkfree be so backward as to not prevent this payee2k problem? |
