Sep 07
21
Capital One: Let us know what you want, and we’ll totally ignore you!
Here’s a candidate for most pointless credit card marketing piece. My wife has a Capital One Visa card that she hasn’t used in a long time. She got the card while she was in college, so the reward program sucks and the credit limit is a ridiculously low $1800. However, since it is one of her oldest accounts we don’t want to close it because of the hit her credit score would take.
Since she hasn’t used the card in a long time, Capital One sent her two mailings, including the one attached. The message was that life changes and so should your card, with an invitation to call Capital One to let them know what changes you’d like to make to the account to make you want to use it. Seems reasonable enough, and we figured it would be good to call them to make sure the card stays active and isn’t cancelled by the issuer
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When calling, we hoped for a much higher limit along with a juicy 0% balance transfer offer. If we couldn’t get a balance transfer offer, we at least wanted to change the card to the No Hassle Cash Rewards program (the one with the 25% annual bonus) so it would be worth using. Imagine our surprise when the request to increase the credit limit was automatically denied! And then the request to change to the Cash Rewards program was also denied! The representative said that they couldn’t change the limit or reward program on that account, but she was welcome to apply for a new card with a higher limit and different program.
If they couldn’t change the limit or reward program, what the hell was the point of the mailing inviting her to call to make her card a better fit? They should have just sent her another pre-approved application if they were just going to invite her to apply for a new card anyway.
Needless to say, she didn’t apply for another card and we’ll continue using our other cards from Citi and Chase instead of a Capital One card. We’ll just make a small purchase on the old Capital One card once a year to keep the account active and preserve her credit score.