March 2014 by Steve M.
I should start by saying I really enjoyed working with the people at this branch. I have business and personal accounts at Suntrust and generally liked the service here. But, my experience with Suntrust Merchant Services (which apparently is a different entity from the bank branch) was a living nightmare. Honestly, I can't imagine a more terrible customer service experience than dealing with Suntrust Merchant Services. My biggest gripe came when my business had an issue with our credit processing software and ended up incorrectly charging a customer 262 times in a row. I immediately attempted to refund the customer and from my end, it looked like the refunds went through. But unknown to me, Suntrust Merchant Services blocked the refunds because their software thought the refunds were suspicious. Suntrust ended up charging me $6,550 worth of chargeback fees for this issue (although it was one software glitch, they charged me $25 for each of the 262 false charges). In my attempts to solve this issue, I spoke to a comically long list of people including: Lori, Terry, Amanda (twice), Nancy, Tara, Athena, Tammy, Hector, Dylan, Heather, Cindy, Ivan, Matt, and Carrie. I also left at least four messages for Joan who is in theory, my Merchant Account Relationship Manager but she never called me back and I have never spoken with her. The bureaucracy there is absurd, with one department not knowing what the other is doing. At some point, I got them to agree that the thousands of dollars worth of fees were unfair and so they refunded them to me. Then, about a month later, somebody else decided to charge me $6,550 again for the same issue. And since Merchant Services is connected to my bank account, they drew money right out of my account without my approval which put me into an overdraft situation. I wish I were kidding. I got back on the phone, spoke to a whole bunch of people again, and this time they were only willing to waive $2,850 worth of fees (which is how much they were able to extract from account before they zeroed me out), even though they already agreed that I shouldn't have had to pay the first time. So I'm out $3,700 and countless frustrating hours for one software glitch that I attempted to remedy immediately. In summary, Suntrust Merchant Services gave me absurdly high fees, a giant bureaucracy, terrible customer service, and the feeling like is was nothing more than a cash machine as opposed to a real person. As soon as I can close down my account, I will.