Monday, July 29, 2013

Capital One: We're too stupid to let you know that we didn't get your payment.


UPDATE: After years of customer complaints, Capital One has finally added a notification if your payment hasn't been received two days after its due date.  The bad news is that... it doesn't work.  You can set the notification up, but it isn't sent.  The crack team of IT professionals over there has supposedly been working on this for months, and still hasn't been able to figure out why all the notifications work except for this one.

So, STILL: If Capital One doesn't receive your monthly payment, you won't hear anything about it.  At some point in the future (it appears to be about two and a half weeks), you'll go to use your card and it'll be declined.  The repercussions can range from embarrassing and annoying to disastrous.

The baffling and inexcusable fact here is that Capital One does not (and will not) send you any notification (not even an E-mail) the day after your payment was due, saying "we didn't get it."  The sheer stupidity of this boggles the mind.  They've already applied their late fee, so they've ripped you off there.  They're already charging you interest on the outstanding balance, so they're making money off of you there.  But by simply canceling your card without telling you, they make it impossible for you to use it and make them more money.  You end up using another card (if you're lucky enough to have one on hand), and they lose the sale.

It's essentially FREE to send an E-mail.  It's automated.  They continually send marketing E-mails to customers.  But they absolutely refuse to inform customers of a critical problem with their account.  UNBELIEVABLE.  Oh, wait: Maybe this is just normal Capital One behavior.