PNM takes 2 months to fix $3,600 mistake
It was one of those bleary-eyed moments of transposed letters and fingers thick as yams when Mark Smith made his $3,600 mistake.
Two months ago at his modest home on Albuquerque’s farthest western reaches, Smith sat down at his computer to pay a few bills. The $3,600 was to be paid to the mortgage on that home, nearly four times as much as the usual $950 monthly payment.
“We’ve been trying to send extra money in as we can in the hopes of paying off our mortgage either later this year or early next year,” Smith said.
That wasn’t an easy thing for the couple, both in their 60s and nearing retirement — she from
a teaching job, he from his work as a “computer guy,” as he puts it.
“We’re not wealthy. We don’t have a fancy house,” he said. “We’ve been working very hard to pay off our house and won’t retire until it’s paid off.”
The name of the mortgage lender is PNC, which in Smith’s online banking list of bill payees is right next to PNM. Which is how everything went wrong. On that April 3 morning, Smith said, he believes he must have clicked on “PNM” instead of “PNC,” sending the utility company nearly 50 times as much money as the Smiths owed on a bill for $73.79. “I guess I wasn’t awake,” he said. Smith said he did not realize the mistake for four days.
“It was one of those ‘Oh, crap’ moments,” he said.
He immediately called his bank to stop payment, but it was too late for that. So he called PNM.
A customer service representative, he said, saw the mistake right away. But that didn’t mean the mistake could be remedied right away.
“I was told it would be three to four weeks before the money could be returned to me,” he said. “And then in a second call, I was told it would be four to six weeks.”
(PNM spokesman Dan Ware later told the Journal that the company has a 30-day waiting period — not four weeks, not six weeks — in place to ensure that the customer has not stopped payment with his or her bank before the refund is initiated.)
And so Smith waited patiently. Two PNM bills came and went, each one showing a substantial credit balance.
On May 15 — six weeks to the day of his erroneous payment — he made another call to PNM and was told the money had not been sent because he had never provided PNM with a bank statement proving that the payment had cleared — never mind that nobody had told him he needed to do that, he said. Never mind that each PNM bill had acknowledged receipt of that sum.
This time, a PNM representative told him he could pick up a check if he went to the offices Downtown. But Smith said that was inconvenient, given he lives and works far west of the office. Perhaps they could mail the check? Well, apparently not. More than two weeks after that last call, no check had arrived, no money repaid.
“I told them that if I didn’t get a check by the end of the week, I was going to contact the media,” he said. And so here we are. It’s funny, though, how that media thing can shake a few things loose. Moments after I started reaching out to PNM on Thursday, Smith said, he started receiving calls from PNM management, each one happily willing to work with him on resolving the matter. One, with PNM Customer Service Senior Manager Eric Morgan, was recorded by Smith with Morgan’s permission.
Morgan politely and apologetically explained how although the normal refund process can take some time because of the check-clearing wait, there had been expedited methods available. That, he said, had inexplicably not been offered by the customer service representatives, nor had PNM clearly explained the process.
“This has been a fumble since your initial contact with us,” Morgan told Smith. “I truly apologize. We had every opportunity early in this whole overpayment situation to get you your money back, and now here we are.” PNM’s Ware had a further explanation. “What we believe happened is that when Mr. Smith initially called about the overpayment, our customer service representative offered a couple of options to facilitate his refund,” Ware said. “Option 1 was for him to call his bank and see if payment could be stopped. The second option was to wait until we had confirmation that the payment had cleared so that we could start the refund process. We believe that the customer service representative did not explain that if he submitted bank documents showing the payment had cleared, that we could expedite his refund in a matter of a few days, rather than the standard 30 days.”
And guess what: The refund check arrived Friday, dated Tuesday. Had it not arrived by today, Morgan had offered to cancel the mailed check and hand-deliver a new one.
Now that’s some service, albeit two months late.
“We regret the matter has taken this long to resolve, and we are going to review our refund procedure so that this sort of thing doesn’t happen in the future,” Ware said.
There’s an old saying about the squeaky wheel getting the grease. That squeak doesn’t have to be rude or threatening. Just persistent, and sometimes with an additional squeaker chiming in.
The Smiths will celebrate their 45th anniversary together later this year in the house on the farthest western reaches of the city. Let’s hope by then they’re closer to owning that house, free and clear.
UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Joline at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/ new to submit a letter to the editor.