Ameriprise Customer Service – Honesty

I recently signed up with Ameriprise Financial Services and last week I worked on setting up my new Ameriprise accounts in Quicken.

At first it was a bit of a hassle as you have to setup your online accounts 2x – first as a financial account and then as a brokerage account.  But once that was setup – everything downloaded into quicken and I was happy to have all my financial accounts in order.

But a day later when I went to download all the updated information into Quicken – the download from my bank and my credit cards all worked.  The download from Ameriprise yielded error messages.  I followed the usual troubleshooting

• First you try again to make sure it really isn’t working
• Then you try again at a different day/time to see if it is a temporary problem
• Then you reset all the accounts to default settings and try again

I did all of the above and still every account worked – except Ameriprise.  So, yesterday I had time to call Ameriprise technical support.  Or, I should say, I had time to be amazed.

After the usual questions to make sure I had rights to the account, the representative asked what the problem is.  I gave a quick summary and he asked me to read the error message.  Halfway through he started reading along with me.  Immediately I knew it was not just me.

And here was the priceless answer – “Sir, that is a problem on our end.  It just starting occurring within the last few days.  There is nothing you are doing wrong.  We’re sorry for the inconvenience”  Literally in one breathe he hit everything:

• The knowledge sharing at Ameriprise was great – he knew about the issue.  No time on hold, no looking for a “senior” rep!
• He gave me the gosh darn honest truth.  “It’s our (Ameriprise’s) fault.”   No BS.  No blaming Quicken.  No blaming Microsoft.
• He apologized

Then he asked – “If you have a moment I can walk you through emailing a log file from your PC that will help our team troubleshoot.”  He ended the call with “I will contact you again tomorrow, how would you like us to contact you.”  When I said my cell number was fine he asked “In case you don’t answer, Is it okay to leave a message on your voice mail or would you prefer I call back.”  I said a message was okay and we finished up.

Today – as promised – I received a call and then a voice mail telling me that the log file was received, the research was continuing.  They were sorry the issue was not resolved yet but they would call when there was resolution.

And you know what – I believe them.  I know that I really will get a call when it is fixed and I don’t need to do anything but wait.  I’m not mad about it the downloading being broken.  Sure there is an inconvenience – but why be mad when Ameriprise admitted the error and provided such great service.