Bank of America: Provide adequate training that keeps jobs and customers safe

We are Bank of America call center workers. Every day, we help customers with their daily account needs from handling deposits to opening credit card accounts. We are dedicated employees, and value giving our customers the best service possible. However, the bank often does not provide us with training that prepares us to adequately and ethically serve our customers.

Much of the training call center employees do receive happens online with no facilitator and no opportunity to ask questions. At work, neither our team leaders nor company’s help desk are able to answer many of our questions that arise. What’s worse: our team leaders and managers are never held accountable when they give us inaccurate information which means that we’re the ones who end up being disciplined and even fired. Team leaders and managers should receive a higher level of training than the associates who report to them, so that they are experts in our policies and procedures.

When we take leaves of absence, we’re not given enough time to be trained on new procedures to ensure we’re doing everything according to up-to-date standards.

Not only is this frustrating for us as employees, it means that customers won’t get the best possible service. In fact, due to strict performance metrics for employees, we are encouraged to limit our time spent with clients instead of taking the time to answer all of their concerns.

We want to be able to do right by our customers and keep our jobs. We have seen too many of our co-workers get fired for making mistakes that adequate training could have prevented. We are asking that independent, federally-guided training be implemented immediately for employees and managers alike.

** UPDATE (from March 2015)! Since we started speaking out about these issues, we’ve seen some improvements to our training. For example, Bank of America introduced a new online banking feature that allows employees to use their mouse to guide their client and navigate them through the online system.

But we still need more improvements. Specifically, we would like to see more and up-to-date training on credit cards (that takes into account federal regulations and training); better online banking training; and diligent training and cross training of managers to ensure that they are fully prepared to assist us in handling any difficult situations that arise. We need this to be consistent and up to date so that it reflects the needs of customers and accountability of the bank.