Chase Reaches Settlement with Customer Who Was Wrongly Jailed

Following national news about a man who was arrested for trying to deposit a Chase-issued check at a Chase branch, the bank and its customer work it out.

In terms of customer service, it's probably a best practice to take care of sticky situations as they arise, lest they become national news that makes your organization look foolish further down the road.

But in the extremely rare situations in which bad customer experiences become big, potentially-damaging news, it doesn't hurt to resolve and apologize for them swiftly and publicly, and then simply move on.

New York-based JPMorgan Chase Bank seems to have learned this lesson after the story of Ikenna Njoku, 28-year-old construction worker who was arrested and subsequently lost his car and his job for trying to cash one of the Chase's own cashier checks at one of the bank's many branches, made national headlines.

Chase spokesman Tom Kelly reached out to Bank Systems & Technology Monday afternoon with a simple message:

"We have resolved the situation with Mr. Njoku amicably and apologized deeply for his experience. He has accepted our apology and thanked us for our efforts."

Further, Chase provided a statement from Njoku:

"I am grateful to Chase for resolving this. They made an honest mistake with the check, and when the right people got involved, they acted quickly to make amends."

Sounds like a swift, decisive resolution to something the bank and its customer would probably prefer hadn't happened in the first place.