Kustomer Serbice

Once upon a time, I was transferring money between a couple of my accounts, when I noticed something. There is a field in the online transaction tool for you to add a description. So I entered an English normal sentence – commas, period.  Sort of a message I would write any time.  I received the response:

The transaction description you have entered is invalid. A transaction description 
can be entered in letters A-Z, numbers 0-9 and special characters /, #, $, % and @.
Please re-enter the transaction description information. 

So I sent them a note, to wit:

In transfer, there is a space for a note or comment, theoretically to help your customers know why they transferred that money. I have worked in IT for 30+ years, and I am stunned that this is not a pure text field.

Specifically, the bulk of “special” characters (like, for instance, those used in this parenthetic example…) are not allowed. What could you possibly be gathering there – assumptively, you are using this field for some business intelligence or sorting routine.

Just professional curiosity.

And, yes, they did respond (sic):

Dear D Otis:

Thank you for contacting Wells Fargo. My name is Bob, and it is my pleasure to assist you today.

I your message regarding the description field for Online Transfers.

We appreciate and value customer feedback and suggestions to make our products and services better. The description field was added based on customer requests for the ability to enter notes regarding their online transfers.

On behalf of Wells Fargo, thank you for your business. We are happy to have you as our customer and appreciate the opportunity to assist you today.

Sincerely,
Bob H
Wells Fargo Online Customer Service

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And I thought, “no, really? It’s for TEXT?”  So, now I know that the reason the text field has restrictions on the characters you can use is because it is text field.