Well, If You Had Asked...

Despite the fact that banks are allegedly in stiff competition for new customers, and to hang on to the ones that they already have, "battling one another for market share," it's been said, it also seems that they expect people to do the work of making the bank work for them themselves.

After being slapped with a fee for depositing too much cash into their account in a single month (Yes, really. This is why I couldn't be a banker. There's no way on Earth that charging people for depositing actual cash in large amounts would ever have occurred to me.), Mark and Roberta Maxwell decided to switch from Chase to Musicians' Interguild Credit Union.

Chase's response - the Maxwells should have come to them.

"For example, the Maxwells could have increased the amount of cash they were allowed to deposit each month without incurring a fee to $10,000 or even $25,000 — if they had sat down with a Chase small-business specialist and discussed alternative types of deposit accounts, said Gary Kishner, a spokesman for Chase."

Maybe Chase should have reached out to the Maxwells instead. (It's also likely, given the current climate of banks seeking to raise fees, that the Chase small-business specialist would have simply lead them into a minefield of various fees, and that while they may have avoided to "depositing too-much cash" fee, there would have been another {or three} waiting in the wings.) Chase's attitude is the root of poor customer service - customers are there to provide profits for the business, rather than the business being there to provide value for the customers.