The Bot Blot on Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC)

Denver, CO, 07/15/2013 (Avauncer.com) – An interesting story has been making its way through the Twitter sphere lately and it has Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) in a bit of hot water as the story continues to attract attention. On 6 July, a tweeter was “chalkupying” right in front of the BAC headquarters in the Big Apple when the city police chased him away. As soon as this news broke out, many members of the twitter community wrote to the bank to give them their opinion of the incident.

Nothing standard about it

What’s interesting is that the person who tweeted the bank about this got a very standard “banking” response. The tweeter was referring to the incident while the bank replies referred to account reviews and assistance that they could provide. Here on, @BofA Help answered several other complaints with very similar responses and had almost nothing to do with the messages that were being sent out to them. This is what sparked off the controversy and accusations started pouring in.

When Bot’s take your call…

People tweeted that @BofA Help was not manned by real people but by Bot’s. In an emailed response, a Bank of America spokesperson said that the bank never used automated responses and that all interactions were personal. The email went on to say that the bank had more than 100 reps who handled social media servicing and that apart from direct replies to customer queries underlying customer issues were identified and responded to as well.

There is a possibility that the incident got escalated due to the court case that was held in San Diego where Jeff Olsen, another Chalkupier had been charged with 13 different counts of vandalism and drawing similar kinds of protests in front of the city’s BAC building. A jury had found him innocent on all charges.