Jananas

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?