Jananas

We’re all well aware that there’s a garbage strike going on. My neighbours put out this strange triangular table, hoping that someone would take it. Its been sitting outside for a few days, looking neglected. Today we got home from brunch (at Sadie’s diner, nomnom!) to find my cat Romeo sitting on the table lounging in the sun. It has everything that a kitty could want: sunshine, plant matter to eat/provide a little shade, and its at the perfect height for people walking buy to pet her.

Romeo was a street cat on my street when I moved into my house eight years ago (although she had been spayed already). She’s mostly indoors these days, but she does love getting to sleep out in the sun in the nicer weather. Its nice to watch people and children in the neighbourhood interact with her and pay attention to her. The entire street has her back!

Its also nice to see her this happy and healthy. She was diagnosed with congestive heart failure back in December and was on death’s door at that point. She was in at the vet’s this week for a checkup and the vet was impressed that she looks so good – in fact, he said it made his day. Romeo is a fighter and I’m glad that she’s had this time with us to get to enjoy days like today and sleeping in the sunshine.

A month or so ago, our friend Robot sent us the following message on facebook:

“Good morrow fellow country people!
I have been charged by his royal highness to recruit you to cheer on the mighty knights of our kingdom in the field of battle. The next tournament is being held on Sunday the 7th of June at 4:00 p.m. at Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament.Tickets can be purchased at the peasant friendly rate of2 for the price of 1 using the sorcerers incantation: BOGOWEB at http://www.medievaltimes.com/

We will be getting the standard package as the kingdom is in a recession and we would all like to feast together (people of the plant included). If by chance you find yourself needing a ticket partner let me know and I will try and link you to another of your fellow country people hopefully with sexy results.

Feel free to recruit others non as then we can cheer even louder and hopefully summon a berserker into the field of battle. Please do not link me to the details of this as I plan on surprising my maiden with a ticket.

If you are able to attend please let me know and I will try to have a staging area for us to meet and rush the gates 30 minutes beforehand otherwise you will have to fight you own way into a seat.

For the Alliance!”

Really, how could we resist? We were assigned to the blue section/knight. Once we got over the cheese factor, we had a blast screaming and shouting and cheering and otherwise being high spirited supporters. It really was a bunch of fun, and our theory is that the more people who come the more fun it would be!

Jason was pretty stoked because they were able to put together a vegan meal for him. Yup, the dinner theatre notorious for half chickens and no utensils was able to accommodate vegans!!! We knew that they had a vegetarian option and when our man wench came around we asked if they could make something vegan. Turns out that the tomato soup is vegan by default. They were able to pull together a meal with a veggie kabob, hummus & chips, and rice pilaf. Sadly our man wench was unsure if the garlic bread and dessert (an apple turnover) were vegan, but it just meant more for me.

Jason definitely has a way better beard than the king.

After dinner, we went out to grab a drink in Liberty Village. The majority of our party was still wearing our paper crowns (we forgot they were on!) and we definitely got some strange looks walking into the rather high end pub.

Overall, we had enough fun that we’re trying to get together another group of people to attend with us on Saturday July 18th. You in?

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So before anyone gets their knickers in a knot or thinks that I’m some sort of woman with an agenda against my former company, I actually busy making cookies while writing/editing last night’s post.

While looking through our cupboards yesterday, Jason had come across a bag of vegan chocolate chips that I’d ever so deviously hidden away (and subsequently forgot about). I haven’t (successfully) baked since we’ve been home so I decided that I should make us something good and wholesome for dessert. [As an aside, dinner was curried adzuki beans & green peas over steamed mixed rice]

I googled vegan chocolate chip cookies to see what would come up, and came across Post Punk Kitchen’s Chewy Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. Seriously, these things are like brownies in a cookie form – just amazing!

Here they are just out of the oven. However, this picture didn’t really do them justice, so I took a close up of one cookie (the was shortly demolished).

And they really are chewy cookies! When the instructions say cook them for exactly 10 minutes (they won’t look done, but they are) – listen!!!! Its what gives them their amazing texture.

Before I begin, a disclaimer. I am a former President’s Choice Financial employee. I worked for them for six years in various capacities, and left before starting my MBA. I cared about the quality of my own work, the quality of our services, and the success of the company. More simply, I was emotionally invested in seeing things work. The following post is not meant to be malicious (although undoubtedly it will be construed by some as being so). Rather as an even longer term customer I have experienced some issues with my service.

Back in 2008, I experienced two separate issues. The first issue had to do with a compromised credit card, the time it took for the fraud department to catch it (more than 1.5 days with very strange spending behaviour), and the subsequent lack of notification that my card had been canceled. The second issue had to do with a change to a backend system setting without my authorization, and for which the company was unable (unwilling?) to provide an explanation. Outside of personal concerns as a customer related to the experience and my treatment, I’m also concerned about the operational costs associated with these issues. In the first case, the fraud write offs and in the second case the additional cost to print and mail statements that I hadn’t requested. I don’t want to see companies spending money that they don’t need to!

In discussions with friends (and former colleagues), it came out that at least two other people had experienced one of these issues – the example of the first is documented here and the second only came to light recently. While I’m not the strongest person when it comes to statistics, I do know that when 2 out of 30+ (a good sample size!) have experienced a problem its probably something more than just a one off quality assurance issue. I’d feel reasonably confident to assume that these issues, in fact, extended beyond to a wider customer audience.

Which brings me to my point today. Earlier this week, someone searched the world wide web for “is President’s Choice Financial good?” And what they came across were my blogs about poor experiences with the company.

This is exactly why companies have to care about what is being said about them on the web. More than that though, they have to join in the conversation. Many people much smarter and more knowledgeable than myself have likely written about brand management and the internet. A portion of that includes communicating with your customers when you come across blogs like the ones I had written. This is not to say that you have to respond to every single one, but that if you respond to a portion of these with something as simple as “we’re sorry that you had a bad experience and we’re looking into it”. Then get back to people with an actual answer about what happened. It means that you’re proactively managing your brand. Instead of it being a negative blog post, it makes your company look better.

And really, how can you be a internet (or online) bank, when you aren’t communicating and interacting with your customers online?

Instead, I heard through the grapevine that people within the company had come across the post (not surprising, as I know for a fact that at least some employees have google alerts set up). Instead of responding though, the internal response was that “100% quality assurance was impossible“. From this I assumed two things. The first is that they considered these both one off issues. But the paragraph up above where I notice that the problem extends beyond just my own personal experience? That implies that it was a larger quality assurance issue. The second is that it shows  to me that customer experience isn’t considered a priority.

Customer experience is important. It isn’t something that you measure once a year and report back on. It isn’t something that you respond to only at a tier three level. Its something that you think about every time you make a decision, write requirements, build systems, plan campaigns, or even test systems before release. It is about long term planning and relationship building.

To the e-commerce and customer experience and brand managers at President’s Choice Financial, what are you doing to manage your online brand and customer experience?

After almost two years of dating a self identified tech geek, I’m find it amusing that I beat Jason both to twitter (although I preferred the name Beardicus for him) and to blogging. To give him some credit, check out the bottom left hand corner of the picture below. Yup, that’s an OLPC, a Freerunner, and a mac laptop. Cuz that’s how the mister rolls. p.s. the ice cream is vegan!

The real purpose of this post, however, is to introduce Jason’s new blog to the world – Beware the Moors. It’s a blog with a healthy dose of lycantropy (given Jason’s love of horror movies, and werewolves in particular, this isn’t surprising) and a focus on: veganism, werewolf movies, open source, and the man himself. You should check it out, and check back for werewolf movie reviews – I’m sure that we’ll be watching many more in the future!