A Promising Update to my Navient Experience – It WAS Partly on Me (but also on them)
Written by Ashley Kelmore, Posted in Random
If you read my post from this weekend you know that I expressed concern about the fact that the only information available on my Navient page is about my current loan, not my loan that I paid off last year. Mostly I was concerned that I might have missed out on important tax documents. From what I could tell, it appeared to be both a function of the loan being paid off and a function of it being a Department of Education (as opposed to Federal) loan.
A little before 9:30 this morning my phone rang, and the number that showed was Sallie Mae Client Services. I have that number in my phone because of a situation in 2011 where Sallie Mae double-debited my large monthly payment after switching bank accounts and raised enough of a stink that someone from their office called me. Now that Navient is managing things, they must have transferred the number to them.
Anyway, I answered the call and it turns out that the woman calling had read my blog post. Coming on the heels of my post last week about social media and the public nature of it, this did weird me out a bit. I realize that my real name is on Twitter, but I think I would have preferred the method other customer service reps have followed before: send me a DM asking if they could email me for more information.
The woman I spoke with was very polite and said that I was emailed something on January 9th that said I’d be getting my tax document for interest under a certain amount soon, and another email telling me I’d be getting my tax document for interest over that amount after that. I’m not sure why the complicated process, but either way I don’t have a record of those emails. However, in looking for that email I did find a different email from a week or so ago that has a link to my Department of Education Loan tax document. Because the subject line was identical to the one for my Federal Loan I deleted it. That’s definitely my oversight.
However, the woman I spoke with also said that I should have been able to access information about my Department of Education from my log-in page regardless. I gave her permission to view my account page, and when she got in she navigated a bit and then put me on hold. After coming back she asked if she could put me on hold again, as she thought this might be an issue she’d heard them talking about with respect to these DoE loans. I had to get to a meeting and so could not hold, but I was able to share with her that regardless of the system, people should be able to access paid loan information from the site and not have to find old emails to access a link that is specific to my account. My log in to their main site should be sufficient.
I think that message got through; we’ll see. But in the mean time I do appreciate that they took my comments seriously.