Ladies, the next time you are thinking about calling your credit card company for an annual fee waiver, you might want to impose on a male relative or male friend to do so.
They will get a much better result, according to a new survey by WalletHub. Men, the survey said, are twice as likely as women to get credit card annual fees waived.
“Men are, on average, less agreeable, and won't put up with fees that they feel are not warranted. When customers push back, companies respond,” said James Webb, executive director for the Center for Financial Reporting & Management, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.
Hass was among a panel of financial services experts WalletHub turned to for further insight on the topic. Another panelist, K. Sudhir, a James l. Frank Professor of Marketing, Private Enterprise and Management and director of the Yale China India insights program at Yale School of Management, said women might just not be as informed when it comes to financial services. He pointed out that data for grocery shopping shows that women do look for deal because they are often targeted for offers. “So it is not that women won’t shop for deals,” he said.
Yet another take on this comes from Zafar Khan, professor and associate Dean at the College of Business, Eastern Michigan University: “ Some of the reasons for not asking or getting a waiver include a general hesitancy to ask, lack of negotiation skills, lack of knowledge, lower income level, etc. And of course, outright discrimination cannot be ruled out,” he said.
The survey, which aimed to learn about Americans’ experiences calling credit card customer service departments, and whether or not they found the process helpful, focused on a sampling of 400 Americans the first week in September.
Interestingly enough, it found that nearly one in two Americans would rather call their in-laws than their credit card company.
But calling a credit card company to request changes or to register a problem is definitely worth it, if you approach it properly, the experts said. “Rants do nothing. Be a gentleman or lady, never use foul language or threaten. Rather, get in the mindset of "what can I do to work this out?” said David Robinson, senior lecturer at Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.
And while the survey found that three in four respondents agreed that calling customer service was worthwhile, one in five said they have lost their temper and yelled at a customer service representative.
The survey also found that millennials get the short end of the stick when attempting to get a credit limit increase. In fact, they are three times as likely as baby boomers to be denied.
The experts attribute this mainly to the huge amount of debt millennials are carrying around.