Would you pay for better service?

It has been a weird summer for me and my checking accounts.  Both my primary and secondary accounts were breached over the past few weeks.   Nothing serious happened.  I didn’t lose any money, but each bank handled the ATM card replacement very differently.

I have a free checking account with Ally, and a regular account with Citibank where there is a minimum balance to avoid service charges.

Citibank Experience (primary account):

I received a call on a Friday evening, around 5:30 or 6pm.

• Agent: Hi, I am calling from Citibank. Unfortunately your credit card number has been breached.  We will need to get you a new ATM card and immediately deactivate your current one.
• Me: Do you know how it happened?
• Agent: No, I do not know the circumstances of the breach.  You should let us know if you see any strange charges.  Do I have your OK to cancel your card and send you a new one.  We’ll send out the replacement card immediately.
• Me:  When should it arrive, I am going on a trip on the following Tuesday and I will be gone for a week.
• Agent: I’ll process this request immediately. I think we are before the deadline to get this delivered on Monday.  Let me confirm with my colleagues that this is the case. …
• Agent:  I have confirmed this will be sent via priority mail for a Monday AM delivery.
• Me: What happens if it doesn’t arrive on time.
• Agent: You can always go into a branch and get a temporary card to use for a trip.  It won’t have a Visa logo, but you can use it to get cash.
• Me: Great thanks for your help.

** The card delivery was attempted on Monday, but that’s another story.  I ended up getting the card on Tuesday after the delivery issues.

Ally Experience (secondary account):

I got a call on a Saturday afternoon from Ally’s fraud service.

• Agent: Hi, I am calling on behalf of Ally on a potential fraud issue.  We have some suspected charges.
• Me: OK, what are the details?
• Agent: Charge A in PEnsylvania, Charge B in Deleware, Charge C in California.
• Me: Charges A and B are not mine, C is valid.
• Agent: Do you have the card in your possession?
• Me: Yes, it has never been out of my possession.
• Agent: We can put a block on your card, but you will need to call Ally in order to get a new card issued.
• Me: OK
• Me: Hi, I am calling because it looks like my ATM card number has been stolen.  I have also noticed suspicious activity on my account.
• Agent: We can issue a provisional credit for the suscpicious activity while we will conduct an investigation.
• Me: I thought my card had been blocked, so I am puzzled this new charge appeared.
• Agent: Yes, your card has been blocked.  No more charges will go through.
• Me: Can I get a replacement card?
• Agent: Yes.  It will take 7-10 business days in order to receive the card.  The PIN will arrive a few days after that.
• Me: Is there a way to get the card sooner, that seems like a really long time.
• Agent: Yes, the rush fee is $15, and the card will be delivered in 2-3 business days.
• Me: Even though the reason to replace the card is fraud?
• Agent: Yes, unfortunately the fee to rush is $15.  Do you want to do the rush?
• Me: No thanks.  Can you process the replacement request?
• Agent: You should receive your card in 7-10 days.  Thank you for banking with Ally.

A few days later I received a letter from Ally to dispute the charges with the typical dispute reasons. IT asked me to attach an affidavit on why the charges were invalid etc.

Customer Service Comparison:

Citibank: The entire process happened in one phone call and a replacement card was received one business day after the initial contact (even though things started on a weekend).

• Incoming Phone Calls: 1
• Outgoing Phone Calls: 0
• Total Days: 4 (including the weekend, and delivery delay)

Ally: After the issue was reported, I needed to make a phone call in order to get a new card.  At this point, I am not sure if my claim has been approved, although the money has been credited to my account.

• Incoming Phone Calls: 1
• Outgoing Phone Calls: 1
• Total Days: 2 weeks and counting

I have banked with Ally for about a year, and it has been a good experience.  The phone lines are open 24/7 and the agents are friendly.  I love the live chat.  The online banking UI is pretty good.  I have been testing them out to see if I’d want to ditch my mainstream bank for an online only bank.  After this experience, I am not sure I am ready to ditch the branch.  If Ally was my only account, I’d have no way to access my accounts or money while waiting the 7 or 3 business days for a new card to arrive.  I also needed to be proactive to get the replacement.  Since the bank had outsourced the fraud monitoring, the phone agents didn’t have access to the systems to generate new ATM cards.  I needed to make an additional call to get a new card issued.  This is a lot of work for something that wasn’t my fault.

With my Citi account the entire process was completed within one phone call.  I also had the opportunity to go to the branch for cash or a temporary card.

A couple of years ago, my Washington Mutual account was impacted by a similar breach where ATM card numbers were stolen.  Wamu was much less proactive than Citibank.  I received a letter in the mail to the affect of: your card number was possibly stolen, we are sending you a new card in the next couple of days.  Please activate it immediately, your existing card will be cancelled on XXX (a few days after the new card was due to arrive).

Honestly, if I hadn’t had the Ally experience, I wouldn’t have bothered to write about this experience.  But Citi is offers superior service and proactive customer support here.  Washington Mutual did not handle a similar situation with the same sense or urgency.

For the average consumer, all banks are the same.  You only differentiate the banks on convenience, price, and services. When everyone looks pretty equivalent on paper, how do you choose?

You tell me, how much is better service worth for you?  Are you willing to pay a premium for premium service?  Do you appreciate premium service when you get it?

Do women need to be jerks to succeed?

This week I’m excited to be on TechnoGirlTalk‘s podcast!  And the buzz of the week, Clay Shirky’s post, “A rant about women.”  We all know how many people spew off nonsense day after day on the internet, but this post stuck a cord all over the place.

Shirky’s idea?  Women need to be more ballsy to get what they want.  And act like an arrogant jerk.  All successful men do this. (Sure.  All arrogant ones is probably more accurate.)

This post reminded me of a life changing incident early in my career.  I have never had an especially loud voice.  I tend to speak quickly, and quietly.  Some people possibly mistake this for being shy and soft-spoken, but the only accurate adjective here is soft-spoken.  As you can imagine, sometimes people might miss my comments during a conversation.

Anyway back to the story, one day in a company meeting we were brainstorming where to go next with a client.  I chimed in with a great idea.  No one heard my idea, so i started to speak up to repeat it, and my so-called “friend” repeated my idea word for word REALLY loudly.  Suddenly everyone was praising his awesome idea.  Fast forward a couple of weeks.  Suddenly everyone thought he was a “strategic thinker” and he landed the best projects and a promotion.  Oddly, I never noticed any exceptional performance or anything else to differentiate him from the other people on our team.  Was it because he was a guy?  A better employee?  Something else?  I’ll never know, but I learned a couple of important lessons after that meeting.

1. Get to your meetings early and sit near the important people.  If you sit right next to them they’ll always hear your comments. 
2. The best way to get your idea implemented is to be the #1 cheerleader.  But this doesn’t mean you have to be a traditional cheerleader.  One of my favorite approaches is find other cheerleaders.  Talk to other influential people about the challenges and problems you notice, and potential avenues to solve them.  You want them to espouse your message without the full details.  Then when you present your idea, they’ll chime in with messaging consistent with your reasoning.
3. Confidence is your #1 ally in selling your idea.  If you believe in it wholeheartedly, everyone else will.
4. Don’t be afraid to interrupt people trying to talk over you. You can do this in a polite and effective way.  And still get your point across. I used to err on the side of letting people finish their spiel, but tactful interruptions are sometimes the best defense.

These days I am know as the “idea girl.”  My co-workers come to me to brainstorm or help them figure out if their plan makes sense.  A role I’ve always wanted to have.    And lots of my ideas get implemented, no megaphone required.

And how about that rant? Every time I think we have all seen the many types of “role models” for women in business, another sad story about a girl who spends too much time letting her self image be influenced by someone else’s crazy ideas.

The best path for women to success at work: be yourself, and ignore all of the jerks out there with their unsolicited advice.

Organization design: functional or phase based departments?

So I was pondering the other day about how organizations are sectioned off.  Most organizations are  grouped by department: sales, marketing, finance, engineering, and operations.  This is convenient for the organizations, less so for the customer.   As social media emerges as a primary vehicle for communications: for marketing, sales and customer service, organizations are struggling to build a communications group, for all stages of the customer lifecycle.

Some companies assign a team to a customer.  So they’ll interface with one account manager, one service person and so on throughout their relationship with the organization.  This is a great customer friendly model, but for smaller organizations, it is pretty impossible to implement while you have limited resources.

For most organizations, the primary goal is to find customers, engage them and keep them as long as possible.  Why aren’t our organizations structured around these phases of the customer relationship?  What if instead we organized our business around stages in the customer lifecycle.  Some roles would have more representation in one stage or another, but the metrics for the organization would be based on performance in the stage?

Here’s a basic lifecycle:

lifecycle

Identification:  finding new prospects, potential customers. Nurturing them until they are ready to progress the relationship with a purchasing cycle.  In this “department” staff would be weighted around communicators.  In a tech company this would include conventional marketing and communications people.  Perhaps pre-sales technical resources.  A market researcher. And a lead qualification team.  The market researcher would pass feedback to the product development team on what prospective customers are looking for.  This team would be graded on the number of prospects they find, and perhaps brand awareness.  This team would be focused on though leadership and making the brand feel “warm and fuzzy.” A key metric would be related to conversion rates between this stage to Acquisition. They’d also focus on understanding the market and the target customer.

What’s PR 2.0 anyway?

So I’ve spent a bit of time over the past couple of months thinking about PR and social media.  It is interesting because suddenly a lot of people are controlling or impacting your message (as a business).  Intentionally or not.  And this time around everyone contributes.  Positively and negatively.  My thoughts?  PR agencies, in the traditional sense should serve as facilitators, participators and filters for the new flood of info.

We discussed this very issue in my marketing training with @jessica_misspr and @shonalnarayan after recapping some of the commentary on the PR 2.0 chat,  so I thought it was a good time to get some feedback on a presentation I’ve been experimenting with.  90% of the experimenting was around being more visual, but I had a brainstorm and outlined this idea.  Comment away, it’s on slideshare (check the notes too).

Wasn’t there already an app for that?

I have one big question about the iPhone, and the App Store.

So Apple put a ton of effort into creating a great mobile browser. It renders web pages much like your computer. It supports web standards pretty well.  But the App Store is full of popular apps that reformat web content.

Like Dictionary.com. And Yelp. Facebook.  Yahoo Messenger. The Weather Channel. You Tube. Yahoo. Pandora. Google. Movies. It goes on and on.  And most of these apps are pulling live data from the web, not offline content.

Wasn’t there already an app for that stuff?  Your web browser?

Why aren’t there just iPhone optimized web pages.  That you point Safari to.

If the goal of the iPhone was to put your web browser in your pocket. Why are so many apps trying to take the web out of the browser.  Putting it into the App.

Isn’t that what we’ve been trying to avoid with on-demand, software as a service and the cloud?

I thought the web was the app.

Matching your appearance to your ideals

Leather shoes + vegan = not consistent

Source: Indexed Blog

So this cracked me up when I saw it.  Because it so true.  Raise your hand if you’ve met a leather wearing vegan?  Dear leather purse-carrying animal rights’ activist: don’t tell me you care about the animal’s plight, refuse to eat meat because it is animal torture.  Because skinning them is equivalently torturous. (Full disclosure, I eat meat and wear leather)

So keep this in mind in your own messaging.  How many companies who are “going green” continue to waste paper in many ways, from refusing to offer electronic copies of notifications or just printing out every email?  Or how about a cutting edge technology company who is using the green screen terminal to manage inventory?

So here’s the point.  Your message and actions should match perfectly.  Otherwise, you’ll lose credibiity.  But this index card said it a lot more eloquently than I could!

– Jame Ervin

An Obama doll: Obama vs. Darth Vader

Hysterical

– Jame Ervin

Split the bill to maintain partnerships

Don't let disagreements over "splitting the bill" be the end

Usually when I go out to dinner with my good friends, we split the bill. We typically eat “family style,” but at the end of the day no one is really concerned if one persons entree was $2 more or something.  It tends to even itself out.  Of course there is one semi-regular companian who hates splitting the bil.  He’d rather calculate it out to the penny.

So on a recent outing, for someone’s birthday we split the bill.  And amazingly enough, he didn’t press for spltting the bill.  I didn’t think anything of it until someone else informed me his friend had 3 drinks.  And everyone else had beer or soda.  Based on the amount/per person, their items were actually 30% more than the amount each person chipped in.  I know his is headed to “Random rant” territory…but keep on reading.

So in this situation, there are a few potential outcomes:

1. Split the bill as usual, it wil even out next time
2. Everyone contributes based on the individual items they ordered
3. Split the bill but chip extra to make up the shorfall on your end, and let everyone else contribute a few dollars less.

Somethings never change…

Yahoo has a new CEO, Carol Bartz. Great, hopefully things will turnaround. What sucks? There are still some annoying people trying to talk about her looks, and how “nice” or “not nice” she is.  Like here. 

Come on, its 2009.  Can we judge powerful women on their leadership skills and experience.  Not whether they are good moms, act like a man, dress well and the rest of the B.S. us women are supposed to contend with?

[End rant]

But on the whole I have been happy with the coverage on her.  But their are always a few people who are still a bit immature.  Let’s judge leaders on leadership, experience and expertise.  Leave the rest to people magazine or personal profiles please.

Microsoft as a Service? Try again MSFT.

Microsoft’s SAAS is more like service-less software.  Let me recount the experience for you.

Went to Live Meeting’s site and here’s how things went.

• Used live chat — good
• Saw there was a free trial — good
• Sign up for a trial with a Microsoft Live account — OK
• Go to the “shopping cart” page without a Livemeeting trial option — LAME!
• Request free trial via chat (or phone) — lame
• Answer 30 demographic questions to sign up for trial — annoying
• No instant access to turning on the trial — lame
• Logging in to put trial in shopping cart and proceeding to checkout — complicated
• Waiting for 2 days for trial account access — lame
• Not receiving notification that the trial option is available in my account — lame

LiveMeeting is a perfect example of how not to sell software as a service.  I wonder, how many people are actually using Microsoft’s hosted version?

On a side note, I got a cold call from Microsoft on the Dynamics CRM suite.  The guy on the other end of the phone had no idea what I was talking about when I said I use Salesforce.com.  

Back to LiveMeeting, here’s a highly unscientific chart on my opinion.

Tally of Live Meeting Feedback