My saga with WaMu

Here is a complaint letter I tried to write to Washington Mutual. I got a CD with them because of their great interest rate here, 4.4% on a 6 month CD. That's the best I've seen in a while. The staff there was very friendly. Anyway, they have on line banking and here begins my story. I tried to set up an online banking account. I called in twice before, but it turns out I was trying to create the account too soon after it was opened. So I waited a week. Then I tried again. Here's the email I was going to send them:

I am writing to let you know of some problems I had signing up with online banking. I am using Mozilla 1.7.2 on windows XP.

The first issue was that I could not associate my CD with my user name. I only have a CD with WaMu, so I do not have a pin number. I clicked on the link that said "Access your account with other information." I filled in my other information, then it gave me an error saying my account number had to be 10 or 11 digits long. My account number is 15 digits long. This meant I had to call customer support. The customer service representative was very helpful, but I was annoyed that I had to 1) change my user name since she created a new account for me and 2) call in in the first place.

The second problem I had was after I was mailed my new user name and password, I had to agree to various user agreements. On the second agreement (I believe it was the online bill pay one), I accepted it and I got a "file not found on server" for page https://login.personal.wamu.com/enrollUpdate/enrollUpdate%5CEnrollAgreementSubmit.asp. I was able to get around that by changing the url in the browser to https://login.personal.wamu.com/enrollUpdate/EnrollAgreementSubmit.asp, but I suspect this isn't how you want the agreement accepted.

My account works fine now.

I understand that providing an error free web application is difficult, but as a new customer hitting two such errors makes me have second thoughts about the reliability of WaMu. I hope you can address these concerns so that other customers will have a better initial experience than I have had.

Thank you for your time.

Now I did not send them this letter. Why you may ask? Because they only have an email form to submit email. (Can you see where this is going?) I tried to submit it and got an error saying they couldn't submit my email and to call customer support. So I did. And the nice man on the other end typed it up for me and sent it. He also told me if I got rid of a few of the zeros in my account number that it would be the correct length. Now I had tried that, I just hadn't gotten rid of enough of the zeros. But it still remains that there was no way for me to know that about the account number.

Anyway it is all over now and my banking works, so I'm happy.