Jananas

So no dice on garlic or ginger, however strawberries and rhubarb were plentiful. I’m not much of pastry chef, my mother’s baking tended more towards cookies and squares. I think that one of my summer goals is going to be to learn how to make pie crust. And practice makes perfect, so here you go! Overall, this pie was easy to make – especially because I had friends who dropped by cut all the fruit while I was making the pastry. If there are still strawberries and rhubarb at the market next week, I’ll definitely be making this again next Thursday evening.

I had a slice of this for breakfast this morning and it was delicious!

Today at lunch a friend and I are going to drop by the Metro Hall Farmers Market, which is held every Thursday from May 29th – October 16th from 8:30am to 2:30pm (for more Toronto Farmers Markets, see here). Fresh fruit and vegetables here I come! Today I’m hoping that I can pick up some garlic and ginger; the garlic because I’ve been craving roasted garlic for the last few days and the ginger because I want to re-make these fabulous vegan ginger snaps I made last weekend. The cookies are from the cookbook Vegan with a Vengeance, which claims to be the best vegan cookbook. Ever. While I don’t know if I fully support that, I do know that I’ve liked everything that I’ve ever made/eaten from it. p.s. the candied ginger on top is 100% me.

The girls of the Pillow Fight League are going to be leading the seventh inning stretch at the Toronto Blue Jays’ game versus the Atlanta Braves on Friday June 27th at 7pm. All you fine folks out there on the interwebs should come on out and support us!

I was out for lunch with a friend and former co-worker today. She told me a story that one up’d my negative customer experience with President’s Choice Financial MasterCard.

She went to make a large purchase yesterday evening (large as in approximately $4,000). Any credit card customer has some expectation that when making large, unusual purchases that the transaction may be declined and you’ll be asked to call in and verify your identity. That’s called good management of your fraud losses. What happened to my friend went something a little more like this… The transaction was declined and the error message did not ask her to call in. She called in anyway to see what the problem was given that she had used her card successfully about seven hours prior. The first CSR went through the basic stuff (verify identification, listen to story) before transferring my friend through to the fraud department. This is where it gets bad.

The fraud CSR tells my friend that her card has been blocked due to suspected fraud (read the big transaction that my friend is currently trying to make). They go through all the previous transactions on the account and my friend verifies that they are all hers. She also verifies the current big transaction. Her husband is also with her and also verifies that all transactions are correct. So – there is *no* fraud on the account. The CSR does my friend a ‘favour’ and lets the big transaction go through.

However, she then cancels the account (and both cards) because there was suspected fraud. She & I both know that this is not correct procedure (given that we are both long time customers and ex-employees of credit card companies). There is no need to cancel a card if there is no confirmed fraud. In fact, its really poor business practice. Not only does setting up a new account in the system, transferring activity, etc. plus creating and mailing out a new plastic cost real money, it also provides for an extremely poor customer experience. Now my friend is without her card for 7-10 business days and is therefore using her Visa. What happens if during that time frame she decides that she likes her other card more? Customer lost!! She also has to spend time calling up and transferring all of her pre-authorized transactions to the new card once she has the number (and hope that none bounce in the meantime). Having to go through the hassle of changing all of this info is bad enough when fraud actually occurs, its downright frustrating/irritating/fuck-you-world when fraud didn’t occur!

What’s the lesson? Train your CSRs properly. Implement business decisions that make sense – both financially for you and for the customer. And bottom line – provide a good customer experience. If you keep doing things like this, your customer get mad. They talk. They tell their friends (hey, I’m blogging about a friend’s poor experience – not my own). They leave. And leaving costs you money, because acquisition costs are high.

I asked my friend to call President’s Choice Financial‘s head office. Not because there is anything that they can do to rectify the situation at this point (besides offering a goodwill gesture), but because head office should know what the CSRs are doing and how frustrated customers are. If nothing else, maybe the procedure will be updated and the CSR retrained – and then some other poor schmuck won’t have to go through the same experience.

Sometimes things are better when taken out of context… In this case, some lucky cropping made the world a much funnier place.

Needless to say, I don’t think this was the intended message when they came up with the marketing concept. Lesson? Pay more attention to your planograms!