We ranked the top five credit card companies on customer service (American Express, Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, and Discover), and here are our final results.

Credit card customer service #5: Bank of America. Though offering the standard services, and having a widespread name and corporate recognition, the actual customer service perhaps suffers at the hand of being such a titanic operation. It’s difficult to find information on the Web site (at least, information that agrees with their live operators), and the personal care touch is gone. Perhaps Bank of America outsourced their customer service operation. Outsourced it to Mars.

#4: Chase. Although adequate, Chase has every one of those small-annoyance features that are frustrating to customers: limited information about APR and the like until agreeing to apply; hold time with crummy music; a slightly confusing Web site; dull and/or mechanical service representative interaction; and limited hours of live person availability. are all attributes that prevent Chase from boasting wonderful customer services. Not really a pain-in-the-neck customer service system, Chase is just average. Not bad bad, but not great.

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American Express
American Express customer service TIME TO 800 NUMBER: Less than two minutes.

HELPFULNESS OF AGENTS: When we got through, we talked to a helpful and professional representative. Even their automated voice system woman who greets you when you first pick up is very concise and polite, as far as robot ladies go.

KNOWLEDGE OF AGENTS: The customer service representative spoke confidently about their 0% APR cards for select customers, as well as low APR cards and offers. The only question the agent was not able to answer was about credit card debt consolidation features. However, Amex did provide direct and concise information for all other questions we asked.

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When determining which credit card company is right for you, it’s important to consider everything the credit card company has to offer. Equally as important as a low APR or advanced security features is the credit card company’s customer service.

Because most consumers overlook customer service until it’s too late, we made calls to the top five credit card companies (American Express, Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, and Discover), then ranked them on how well they met the following customer service benchmarks:

Helpful Web sites: First we visited their sites to see how user-friendly they were, and whether toll-free phone numbers were easy to find.

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