[justin66]

Not terribly important but there are a few paragraphs there that contain a number of factual assertions completely contrary to my experience with the training we all received at a major regional US bank. I wasn't a CS rep (I'm an engineer) but everyone received a lot of training on this stuff (our customer service tenets were treated with the same seriousness as anti-money laundering, know your customer, and all the other stuff every person in the bank received training on, because failures in these areas can all lead to very bad places) regardless of their position.

Mean words cannot hurt a bank. Threats cannot hurt a bank. Paper trails, though, are terrifying to regulated institutions. Your bank’s customer support representatives are taught to evaluate whether someone looks like they’re competent and collecting a paper trail. If they are, the CS rep is supposed to stop touching the case immediately and instead escalate them to a supervisor or to the legal department.

At a first approximation everything in that paragraph is wrong. Banks care a lot about reputational damage (i.e. you can make them look horrible on twitter or in a news article) and will immediately begin taking you more seriously if you mention you might contact a lawyer, are already in touch with a lawyer, etc. It's true that communication is better and things work more smoothly if you have all your ducks in a row, but I think a respectful customer service rep is just going to assume that a paper trail exists or can be produced. They aren't going to try to take advantage of a situation where a person does not have every last document at hand during the call in order to provide worse service.

Perhaps interestingly, "legal department" is a phrase I do not recall anyone using at any bank or credit union where I've worked. I mean, they've got lawyers, and I suppose most of them are organized into one or more departments... nevertheless.

If you're feeling contrary, especially on the topic of reputational damage, you would be right to point out that banks like Wells Fargo continue to exist. I am in awe of the fact that anyone continues to bank with them.