Two of the nation’s largest banks have experienced customer-service crises in the last two years that can provide object lessons for the industry.

The Boston-based U.S. division of the $83 billion, Spain-based Santander Bank, and Wells Fargo Bank, a national bank headquartered in San Francisco, have been conducting damage control resulting from misfired customer-service campaigns and have been striving to make things right.

A Long Way Back

Santander Holdings USA received a worst-ranking customer-satisfaction rating from J.D. Power’s most recent annual U.S. Retail Banking Satisfaction Study, which covered fee transparency product offerings and issue resolution. The bank had come under criticism for the activities of its subprime auto-lending practices; attorneys general in Massachusetts and Delaware ordered its Santander Consumer subprime auto lending division to pay $25.9 million to resolve investigations.

The bank was also ordered to pay $10 million in fines by the Consumer Financial Protection Board last year in connection with consumer overdraft protection marketing practices found to be deceptive – with customers being signed up for the program without their knowledge. The activities originated with a third-party vendor Santander employed between 2010 and 2014 to telemarket the overdraft product. The CFPB ordered the bank to discontinue use of such third-party vendors under terms of a July 14, 2016, CFPB consent order.

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) is one of the supporters of The Committee for Better Banks, an industry and consumer advocacy group. Teresa Casertano, global campaigns organization coordinator for CWA, said Santander Consumer required employees to meet sales standards or be marginalized, and possibly terminated. She cited higher interest rates and longer loan terms that get the subprime customer into higher-priced products – and up-selling of model accessories – and aggressive collection strategies for customers struggling to pay.

Casertano noted that the auto lending component is an autonomous unit.

“The workers themselves are usually the first to see and know when policies and practices are hurting them and the customers they face every day,” she said, adding that it’s consumer-unfriendly policies, not errant employees, that caused the customer satisfaction problems cited in the J.D. Power report.

In response to the J.D. Power ranking, Santander spokesperson Ann Davis said that its findings were expected. She cited its second-highest improvement score in its bank peers in 2016, as well as customer-focused initiatives implemented in the last 12 months, including extending business hours, introducing a Business Banking mobile app, enhancing its consumer banking app and launching Apple Pay.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency downgraded Santander’s rating in March, and 11 U.S. senators sent a letter demanding further investigation. Davis said that the bank “strongly disputes” the report’s findings.

Santander’s Boston headquarters at 75 State St. was the target of a small sit-in on March 27 as a handful of demonstrators briefly entered the bank branch on the building’s ground floor. While the bank’s corporate security team closed the branch for less than an hour to ensure customer and employee safety, Davis said “at no time was Santander’s corporate headquarters shut down.” She attributed the incident to “another aspect of an ongoing campaign sponsored by the Communications Workers of America to unfairly and inappropriately discredit Santander.”

Davis said that Santander recognizes and respects the rights of employees to choose whether or not to unionize under U.S. law, and provides “an employee-friendly workplace where our employees are recognized and motivated and where direct, open and frequent communication between employees and management is encouraged,” and to create a work environment in which” customers are treated fairly and employees are held to a high standard of ethical conduct.”

It Was Right There

That brings us to Wells Fargo Bank, whose problems bear some similarity to Santander’s, particularly in the risk associated with decentralized, autonomous divisions. Wells Fargo Bank employees, under direction of their management, created more than 2 million fake accounts from 2011 to 2015. Unlike Santander’s third-party telemarketer, the fraudulent practices originated inside the bank, with their discovery leading to the sacking of 5,300 lower level employees.

In a recent CNNMoney interview, current CEO Tim Sloan, a 29-year veteran of the bank, was asked how this practice could have escaped his purview. Sloan replied that in his roles of CFO and then president and COO, he did not oversee that segment of the bank’s business. The bank had “a decentralized structure that worked well for decades,” he told interviewer Poppy Harlow, but more recently, it clearly fostered a risk-prone culture.

He noted that a report by the bank’s board did not find a pattern of retaliation against the whistleblowers who called the bank’s hotline, though there was “some” retaliation against some of them.

Harlow asked if Wells Fargo had become too big to manage. Sloan responded that leadership has since taken responsibility by moving the risk and control functions to a centralized organizational location to be able to better oversee marketing practices.