<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">I'll tell you a short story: about ten years ago, the Bank of America in California had what they called VIP lines in most branches. If you were a VIP accountholder, which I was and still am, you could basically cut to the front of the line in this VIP line. I belive a lot of customers resented this, since it was so obvious that the VIP people were in no more of a hurry than the non-VIP customers, so Bank of America doesn't have the VIP lines any longer. Basically, it just looked really bad.</font>
They still have VIP Banking at BofA, they even have different tiers, with Premier Banking and Private Banking (I'm not sure why you don't know this, if you were once and still are a "VIP accountholder.") Citibank has the same thing, but calls it Private Banking, Wells Fargo calls it Private Client Services.
Just because you don't see the lines anymore doesn't mean the special treatment isn't there - it's just more subtle and sophisticated. Wells Fargo has entire separate offices for their PCS customers.
BofA gives their Premier clients a specific contact individual with whom they deal. Don't you use that feature, since you're a "VIP accountholder" with BofA?
A very large industry has developed around delivering companies the ability to customize product/service offerings in a manner that helps retain a company's most profitable customers. Called a number of things, but commonly "Customer Relationship Management," this overall philosophy says that you want to treat your best (generally, the most profitable) customers in a way that makes it most likely that they will be retained (because it costs much more to acquire a customer than it does to retain one, if you use your money wisely). This extends to things like banks providing faster hold times for their more profitable customers. That's why you punch in your account number at your credit card company, so that their computers can sort your account from all the other callers and direct it to the correct person and with the appropriate priority.
For general information about CRM, one good place to look is the following:
http://www.crm-forum.com/
Flyrights, you keep challenging us as to why we continue to read and reply. From my perspective, I read this because it's not dissimilar to watching a motor vehicle accident. You can't turn your eyes away, regardless of the horrificness.
I don't know what it is that you do for a living, but if you don't understand that it is reasonable for a company to treat its more profitable customers better than its less profitable customers (and 6 pages of posts by people who really, honestly, have been trying to explain why it's reasonable haven't gotten there), I have sympathy for a corporate employer of yours.
Greg
[This message has been edited by greg99 (edited 07-23-2002).]