I just had one of those amazingly rare situations of having great customer service, with a bank no less! The second part of this sounds funny since I live, eat and breath technology but this whole experience was great.

I reconcile my bank accounts essentially daily in Quicken. I’ve done this forever (or at least over 6 years which is mostly forever). I saw on Friday that a check cleared for our plumber (see related story) for $158.95 but I had entered $138.95 in the register. Something was amiss!

So, first I logged into USBank.com and used the nifty feature where I can see an image of each check processed. I looked at this check and right away saw the issue, I had written the 3 somewhat sloppy and you could mistake it for a 5, but the long-hand version clearly said “thirty”. I called up USBank and entered my information to get to a customer service person. After getting the person on the line she brought up the check on her system. We both agreed on the error and she applied a credit.

Here is the part that just shocked me. She told me to refresh my screen and I would see the correction. I was taken aback. Surely the USBank.com site runs on some daily dump of data. There’s no way this is all tied right into the main transaction system for the bank! No way. I hit refresh and right there was my credit.

I wish all my transactions were this simple. I left with an immediate solution, I was empowered to verify the situation without even calling them and I and the customer service person were looking at the same information. Kudos USBank!