Motive Customer Service & lack thereof | Page 3 | Motive Financial | Discussion forum

Norman1: I figured it had to be something like that. When a cheque bounces, it's pretty that I wrote the cheque unless it's forged, and there have been a variety of methods used over the years to make that harder.

But if I never asked for a transfer, trying to hold me responsible would certainly make me - and lots of other folk - call FOUL!
RetireEd

Norman1: We all need to keep an eye on our billings, yet businesses are increasingly setting their cash terminals to NOT print customer receipts, claiming nobody wants them. I haven't see receipts lying around businesses, though. So we have to request a reprint and end up with a longer, more annoying receipt with large print reading, "DUPLICATE" to store.

The fitness industry's bread and butter is customers who sign up and never use their memberships. Most of them would never have room for anyone to stand if many of their customers regularly attended.

The high cost and committed payment are claimed to motivate folks to exercise, but in reality it's just soaking the lazy.

A noted gym chain here in Vancouver campaigned for months to repeal the HST in BC. They succeeded. Then members had to badger them endlessly to get them to STOP billing for HST after it was repealed.

Fitness outfits everywhere habitually make it hard to cancel membership billing.
RetirEd

RetirEd, I agree, it's a genius business model!

To me the fact that fitness clubs can proliferate and prosper is just one indicator of a super-affluent society.

Just called Motive, 10 second wait, asked when the 5-day hold comes off funds brought in last Wednesday, it's tomorrow. Guess we count 5 business days a bit differently, it's no big deal.

So are modern people not checking their monthly credit card statement for errors? That's why I ask for the paper receipt, but am I doing something that no longer needs to be done? (I realize there are always some extremists who will want to check no matter what because 20 years ago they found a $5.60 charge that wasn't theirs but is the general practice now not to bother because it's unnecessary?) I'm not sure I've ever found an error.

Last weekend I made the decision to place the April GIC’s in my ‘Horizontal Ladder Plan' with a 1-yr GIC at Motive and a 2-yr at People’s bank. I waited until Monday to begin the money move to these institutions.

Early Monday morning I arranged a transfer from Achieva and another from Oaken to our hub account at CIBC. Both transfers were available in our CIBC account by Tuesday morning. CIBC does not put a hold on transfers to our account so on Tuesday I arranged to pull funds into Motive and People’s.

On Wednesday morning both Motive and People’s accounts showed the transfer amount credited but on hold. Our CIBC account did not record the transfer until overnight Wednesday.

This morning, Thursday, I called both Motive and People’s to see if I could get the holds lifted and proceed with the GIC purchases. At both institutions I was connected to a CSR within 3 minutes.

It was no problem to get the holds lifted and each GIC was negotiated during the phone call including some fine tuning to make them joint and payment at maturity to our savings accounts. I couldn’t have asked for any better service during this whole process.

There has been a lot of B&C about service from online institutions lately but I am extremely pleased about the service I received from Achieva, Oaken, CIBC, Motive and People’s during this process. I thought it would be useful to point out this out to counter some of the negative reports that have been prolific lately.

To be fair, I do not use online accounts for day-to-day services - for my purposes they are investment savings accounts. To this end, they serve me well and I appreciate the service I get.

Those are wildly different experiences, RetirEd, you finding about 4 credit card errors every single year whereas I find none that I can recall over decades.

Maybe the difference lies in the fact that pretty well all of my (actually it's 99% my spouse's) purchases are at large, chain retailers, do you buy your stuff mainly at small, independent businesses?

That's interesting, RetirEd, maybe it's those restaurant workers Norman1 referred to. Are the errors consistently one way, always in merchant's favour? Are they consistently small errors? We have maybe 10 - 20 fast-food chains or local pick-up pizza joint charges per month, no tips involved, can't recall an error.

That's still a lot to me, an error every few monthly statements months for you. I wonder if there are big differences depending on where one lives.

In any event I think I'm going to stop detailed monthly review of every charge, maybe just scan statement to make sure nothing obviously wrong & then throw out paper receipts.

Bill: After they stopped providing carbon or no-carbon copies, I carried around a little piece of carbon paper folded in my wallet and made sure to copy my signature from the Merchant Copy to my own. Some merchants would protest, but it served me well when my card was cloned twice, ten years apart. I pointed out I'd never used an unsigned receipt and those fakes were unsigned, and they accepted that as proof, not to mention that the fakes were always on-line purchases and I'd never made any.

Then came chip&PIN and we lost that surety. Mind you, one of my Amex cards is still signature-enabled; I requested it on renewal and they had a pile of unused blanks for that relatively rare card. The other type burned through its supply long ago and it's now chip&PIN.

I see errors both in my favour and the merchants'. Most of the errors are small, save the double-charges which can be substantial. Several of those have been at gift shops with hand-entered data. Reversing of digits is common. Last year I picked up the $250 bill at a Chinese restaurant, collecting everyone else's cash and making one charge. (Yes, they let me have their points.) The restaurant submitted the bill, but when the issuer returned it for verification they never sent it back. Two billing cycles later, with the charge still outstanding on my spreadsheet, I had to nag the restaurant manager three times to dig it out and resubmit it. All with a helpful manager who tried his best despite the language barrier - he was sure I was trying to get a refund. I eventually had to explain to his bookkeeper.

Could I have let it drop? I'd have felt awful, and if the problem had been found later I would have looked like a sleaze.

Like cgouimet, I enter charges at the end of each day and check the spreadsheet against the statement, drilling down if they don't agree. In any case, reviewing bills is good for one's awareness of spending.
RetirEd

randy said
have had an acct with them for a few years and now they've decided to close it; not a good experience at all, zero stars!  

What reason was given for closing the account? Inactivity?

Stephen