Customer Service

Baltimore Gas & Electric has upgraded its website and customer interface software. As often happens in these matters, not all seems to be going smoothly. I've heard from several customers who are having problems with the site. Says one: "Have you tried to pay a BGE bill online lately - much less, get a live account representative on the telephone?  You'll find it is virtually impossible to pay your bill or view your account history.  Good luck to us all with BGE's 'improved' service!"

So, the reindeer sweater from Aunt Emma this Christmas isn't quite your style, so you and thousands of others are now in the process of returning gifts. Which retailers provide the speediest returns? STELLAService, which rates the customer service of online retailers, put them to the test. The company ordered and returned several items to the top 25 retailers from various parts of the country during the weeks before Christmas. The fastest: Amazon.com, whose returns averaged 4.3 days.

My story today about fake check scams prompted reader Alan Nathan to call with a similar scheme. Nathan, who is unemployed, says he received a letter from a company in Ontario, Canada, thanking him for applying for a customer service job. Nathan says he didn't. The letter included a check for $3,780 that he was instructed to deposit in his bank account. “It looked like a real check. The address (on it) was a business on the Avenue of the Americas in New York City,” he said.

The next time Ana Ferguson and her husband lose power for an extended period, they will be prepared. The Pikesville couple bought a generator after five nights without electricity in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene. "We had to do it because we can't rely on BGE to put the lights on and keep the lights on," Ferguson said. While Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. took the brunt of criticism from customers and public officials for its pace of power restoration after the late-August storm, other utilities around the state also have come under fire in recent years for poor customer service, frequent outages and other reliability concerns.

Why are the Occupy Wall Street protesters being encouraged with gifts of free food and medical care while those who are homeless are shunned? I agree that everyone has issues which are valid ones to address. Mine include how health insurance companies keep jacking up rates and arguing over coverage yet manage to pay their CEOs millions. How doctors order unnecessary tests or prescribe dangerous drugs in order to line their pockets. And how businesses could care less about customer service, relying instead on automated voice answering machines that don't even understand what the caller is saying.

I read with interest Gregory Karp's article discussing the relative advantages and disadvantages of credit unions and banks ("Crowning a banking champ," Oct. 23). As the article correctly points out, both banks and credit unions offer consumers distinct benefits. Ultimately, however, banking today is all about getting services to customers, rather than the other way around. Consumers now want convenience along with stability. They want to make transactions quickly, get accurate and timely answers to questions and conduct business whenever it is convenient for them.

A crowd of more than 100 people, mostly seniors, gathered Tuesday evening to voice their concerns to the state's energy regulator about Baltimore Gas and Electric Co.'s performance following Hurricane Irene. "It was scary," said Eileen Sakin, part of a busload of AARP members who attended the meeting. "We had no lights on our street or in our whole neighborhood. " It was the Maryland Public Service Commission's final public hearing on BGE's storm response. Of the state's utilities, BGE had the largest number of customers in the state affected by Irene-related outages, more than 750,000.

Some people rarely use their debit cards for purchases in stores or elsewhere. If that's the case for you, one way to avoid ever being charged Bank of America's debit card fee is to switch to a plain vanilla ATM-only card. It's a good option for folks who only use their debit to withdraw money from the ATM. And it provides another benefit: if that card is stolen the thief would need to know your PIN to get access to your cash --- they couldn't use it in a store, either. A Bank of America spokeswoman told me this morning that customers who want an ATM only card should call customer service or stop into a banking center.

After leaving Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. customers without power for up to eight days and with a poorly functioning customer service line in the wake of Hurricane Irene, it's appalling that Constellation Energy Group would have the nerve to turn around and ask us to foot the bill for cleanup ("BGE estimates Irene response cost $81 million," Sept. 21). BGE customers already pay some of the highest utility rates in the country and have seen average rate hikes of 58 percent since 2007.

Our cavernous family room presents a lighting challenge. For nearly 18 years, we've lived with the builder's insane idea of decent lighting: two recessed lights above our fireplace illuminating a framed, faded poster from my college-apartment days, and the weak halo cast by a ceiling-fan light fixture. Early on, my in-laws came to visit and were appalled at my lack of lighting (and possibly décor, though they were too kind to mention that). They insisted on buying some lamps for us, which created twin oases of light on either side of our family room couch.