West Coast vs. Midwest
There seems to be a distinct difference between West Coast companies and those from elsewhere in the country, with those from the midwest being the absolute worst. Maybe there’s something in sea breeze that makes people do things right.
I decided to try Mint.com (Mountain View, CA) today, and I was absolutely blown away. It is so well done and feels so much like a real app that when I needed to go to my bank’s website to check something, rather than go for the ’switch tab’ keyboard shortcut I reached for the ’switch app’ shortcut. It’s as if I subconsciously forgot I was using a web app! Starting with the sign-up process, everything seems to work exactly the way it should. For example, when typing in my ZIP code, it made an AJAX request and automatically retrieved the name of my city. Why doesn’t everybody do that? I added my accounts (which was an almost flawless process), and away it went. It’s really an incredible application.
Since I had that up and running, I decided to glance through my account information and noticed that my car payment is due tomorrow, and it will be the first payment since switching my payment method to “Direct Automatic Pay” with my auto financing provider (Detroit, MI). I figured I’d double-check that everything was set up for that, and I found the following on the Account Center section of their website:
- I had no pending payments
- I had not registered a checking account for direct payment
- The direct payment option was grayed out
- It would not let me change payment methods
- When I tried to re-register my bank account, the results were ambiguous at best
Finding this somewhat worrisome, I immediately set up an online payment with my bank (Chicago, IL/Troy, MI) — which spawned way more browser windows than I wanted — then called the auto financing people to work it out.
Amazingly, I got through to a customer service rep. in about 1.5 rings with no hold time (after navigating through a bunch of touch-tone stuff, of course), and it turns out that everything was set up fine, and that four business days before a payment is due, they gray out the payment method because they’re already prepping the transfer. Now, I don’t understand why it takes 3-5 business days to electronically transfer money from one institution to another, but that’s a whole different story. At the very least, the website should have told me that I have a payment pending, to be withdrawn tomorrow, that I have a bank account set up and properly linked to my account, and that I can’t change the payment because of this limitation. But no.
Oh, not to mention that I thought maybe there was a browser compatibility issue, so I switched to Firefox from Safari, and in Firefox there was a nasty formatting bug that pushed some text onto a new line that absolutely should not have been there.
Dear Midwest,
It’s no longer acceptable to put a few ugly GIF images on an even uglier front-end to your database and call that Online Services like you could in 1996. Take a page from Mint, Google, and the rest of the Mountain View crowd and I bet you’ll be able to run your online services with fewer people, using better technology, and have higher customer satisfaction. Until then, I guess I’ll have to hope that I can get through to phone reps as quickly as I did today.
Your customer (because I have no other options),
Noah
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