So I recently opened a joint account a Chase bank to help my mother. I wouldn’t have chosen Chase due to the fact that they charge $5 dollars to cash one of their own checks if you’re not a customer. What the fuck?! That’s far beyond a reasonable convenience fee… You’re telling me you don’t even honor your own checks Chase? What could possibly constitute such a charge? Yeah it really pissed me off. Especially after walking down the street to Washington Mutual to find they wouldn’t charge me anything not even one or two dollars, which I would expect and which wouldn’t piss me off nearly as much at $5 effing dollars. So… Needless to say, at this point, my user experience / customer experience was pretty low… But that was before my mother opened our joint account.

So my first few weeks with Chase still didn’t make me a fan, in fact reconfirmed my dislike for their service. Online transfers from savings to checking take a day, I’ve grown acustom to imediate transfers between my own accounts with my other bank. Time after time I’ve gone to ATM’s which are out of service. I understand this could be due to vandalism or other issues… So what! I don’t care. There should be more than one or even two ATM’s at a location. All I care about at that point is the fact that I’m going to have to find and drive to another Chase ATM just to find that this ATM is out of order too. OMF’nG (not in my usual vocab)

That brings me to what happened today. I drove once again to the Chase ATM within a half mile to find that once again it’s out of order. [Did they ever even fix it?] Well I wasn’t anymore disappointed that I expected to be.. So I move along to the next ATM. I go in to make a deposit just to find that there are NO ENVELOPES! Damn it! Because I’ve had this happen before with my other financial institue I had  evelopes saved in my car and I actually found it somewhat amusing that I would be cashing checks in an envelope of a competitor bank. So I seal up the envelope and proceed to make my deposit. That’s when I notice the sign “Envelope Free Deposits”… Huh? I was somewhat hesitant. Is this safe. I did consider using the envelope anyway. I mean this is money we’re talking about and I personally don’t like taking chances mine [or my mums]. But I went for it, I deposited three checks, all at once just like the screen said. I thought for a seconds ‘hmm I didn’t enter a total..’ Whoa! What do you know it scanned the checks and added up the total, completely accurate and gave me the option to print out a receipt of the transaction with images of each check. Nice.

This is cool stuff, I didn’t need an envelope, I didn’t have to add up my checks, and I didn’t have to load them one at a time. I wouldn’t say that this has made me want to make Chase my primary bank by any means. However I did find it impressive. It’s the small details like this that can make an impact on a user / customer, grow loyalty, and give their customers a reason to tell there friends about kick ass ATMs.