Yesterday wasn’t a shining moment for me as a customer (on the phone) with Sallie Mae. Since I took over Somara’s finances, I have implemented a plan to allocate more money toward her smallest of the four student loans she took out to attend culinary school. The problem is Sallie Mae’s consolidation. For some alien reason, they lumped the dinky Stafford loan of $2500 in with the private monster loan which is equal to the price of a VW Passat and has a different, higher interest rate. The remaining two are the same in every regard so they’re no problem.
Anyway, the plan has always been to allocate all excess money toward the smallest loan of the quartet. When it’s paid off, its money will be reallocated to the next smallest. Repeat until they’re gone. It may seem to be a simplistic strategy yet it worked for me when I had to juggle a car payment, a line of credit and my student loans. So far this financial plan has worked despite a couple shifts (the Timeshare in Vegas). We look great on paper and we’re still under half the national average for short-term debt.
The problem lies in Sallie Mae’s online payment system. With the tiny Stafford and the huge private loan being lumped into one Group (their classifications), I can’t distribute the amounts when I pay. Thus, all the additional money is evenly divided between the two which hampers any traction on the loan we can eliminate sooner. SM’s remedy? Send an e-mail to customer service every month with the account number, transaction number and what I want done. One would think an institution of Sallie Mae’s caliber would invest in better web technology.
When my most recent payment was completely skewed toward the private loan, I was pretty livid because I dumped my Memorial Day bonus into it. This was enough to make a significant dent on the tiny one. The e-mail requesting the correct numbers hadn’t been answered so I called the toll free number. Probably the worst thing I could’ve done. After I navigated through a phone tree worse than AT&T and Citibank combined, I ended up in a call center in India. How did I know? The poor quality of the connection and the thick accent of the agent in addition to her first name. Even on my worst days supporting people at Apple, I still use the words “please,” “thank you,” and maintain a somewhat detached demeanor. I think she graduated in the bottom rung of her call mill training. After I had enough of her running me around in circles, I lost it and told her, just forget I called since you’re just no help. How I crappy I felt too. I don’t like guff from customers at my job which probably makes me overcompensate by being ultra nice when I call Chase, AT&T, etc., especially when I know the person on the other end is in the US or Canada. I have no patience with companies that use outsource centers in India. Their products are overpriced and the support bites. The only people who benefit aren’t the customers, it’s the board lining their pockets with uglier profit margins. Hence, I will be terminating my business with Citibank in the near future. My irritation continued long enough to send another e-mail to Sallie Mae over the rotten experience and to start looking into have the loans moved to Wells Fargo or Frost Bank.
Oddly, I received a reply to the original allocation message stating how my original request was carried out. Could’ve fooled me if I believed the inept phone agent. I had just visited the Sallie Mae web site earlier too but when I checked again, everything was as it should be! This warranted a response explaining the earlier dilemma and an apology appeared almost as suddenly. From now on, I’m just going to deal with SM through e-mail yet I’m still troubled over the inconsistency of the phone v. e-mail experience.