Corporate inefficiency

“Conservative” politicians and billionaires keep touting corporate “efficiency”, but I keep finding case after case where they are efficient is inefficiently interacting with their customers.  How many times have you received a satisfactory answer with your first call or email?

I dropped my Republic Bank accounts (including VISA) last year because they blamed Consumer Cellular for the errors I received trying to access my Republic account through my iPhone: both the app and the online account.  Republic said the problem was with Consumer Cellular.  Consumer Cellular said the problem was with the bank.  Neither seemed really interested in pinpointing the problem.

My wife had no problem accessing Pioneer National Bank through her Consumer Cellular phone.

After I opened my Pioneer accounts, I transferred all my funds from Republic Bank to Pioneer.  I wrote Republic to close all my accounts including my VISA account.  I no longer receive monthly statements from Republic.

However, this week I received a notice of a statement from VISA for my Republic card.  Oh, boy!  Did I forget to notify somebody that automatic payments should no longer go to Republic VISA?

When I finally looked at the statement, it was to notify me of my renewal fee!  $0.00!!

I did find a “Contact Us” button that allowed me to call this unneeded statement to somebody’s attention.  I also stated that I had requested Republic Bank to close my VISA account.

Earlier in the week I received from AT&T “Exciting news - your wireless bill from AT&T is now on video.”  Who is it exciting new?  The producers of the video and the advertising department.  It was just a bother to me.  The email didn’t say whether the data for the video was to be charged to my account or was free.  I didn’t bother to find out.

However, I did open up MyATT account, saw the current bill, and paid it, also asking that all future bills be automatically be billed to my credit card.

Imagine my surprise to receive an email today that my bill was ready!  i double checked and the online balance was zero.

I tried to send a message to AT&T and found a page:

Contact Us
AT&T Support - quick & easy support is available 24/7.

I looked and looked for an email form, but I only found two choices: call an 800 number or Online Chat.  I don’t want to wait for “the next available operator",  and I don’t want to wait for the next chat person, type what I noticed, and “hang up”.

I wonder if AT&T uses one of the reputation services, and if so, will the service find this blog post and will AT&T act on it.

Don’t stay tuned!  We may never know if AT&T even read this post.

I think it was the New York Times that had an article this past week that said most telecommunications companies really don’t want to solve your problems: just pass you from one person to another.

“Hello, Melvyn Magree.  My name is ______ and I will be glad to assist you.”  This is generally followed by some generalized gibberish that doesn’t even address the problem, like completely reset your device.

An exception that we’ve found is Apple if you have a device under an Apple Care warranty.  My wife’s iPhone either wouldn’t come on at all or would only get up to 30% charge.  A search of the Apple Support Community came up with over 23,000 topics on this problem.  The only advice seems to be to hold the home and lock buttons together for quite a long time.  For us and others, this did and did not work.

The 23,000 figure does not indicate an efficient corporation, especially when the number of users who have this problem could be ten or more times greater!!

Fortunately my wife’s IPhone was still under warranty.  The Apple Care people walked us through a few steps, and it would work for a while.  After a few calls, they sent us a new phone.  Of course, we didn’t have a backup and had to manually enter phone addresses.  I did manage to print a list from the old phone before we sent it back.

Oh!  And we could never erase the old phone.  It kept asking for a re-something passcode.  It would never accept the phone passcode and we could find no workable answer in the Apple Support Community.  We had to return the problem phone with only the assurance that Apple would erase the data.

How did we get into this mess?  I remember when it was a big deal to have direct-dial long-distance.

How much corporate nonsense can I take in a day?

I received an email about a sale of Adobe Photoshop Elements 12.  Since my old Elements expired long ago, I decided to give it a go.  I clicked on the button in the message and a webpage opened with an ad for Elements 12.  It required me to sign in before continuing.

When I did so, it said that I needed to use a new password.  They would email me a temp password.  That came in a short time.  I used the temp password and created a new password.  That verification came in a short time.

Finally, I could order Elements 12 and I did.  I went to my cart and was ready to whip out my credit card.  Fortunately, I read the details of the order before I checked out.  It was for a Windows version!!!  No matter what I looked under, I could never get a Mac version.

I was going to give up, but somehow I clicked on Chat Now!  I explained my problem to 'Selena' and after a few minutes, she gave me a link to the Mac version of Elements 12.  Then I looked at the download times and decided to pass.  Besides, the time for this simple chat was almost ten minutes!  Total time trying to order must have been over 30 minutes!

I have been slowing moving my email from one provider to another.  Sometimes we can tell an organization our new email and it is changed in minutes.  Some organizations say it will be updated in 10 days.  Sometimes we tell an organization and our email is only updated for one department; email from other departments goes to the old email address.

And sometimes we get a doozy of a notice:

"Your primary e-mail address has been updated.  Please note that if you deleted your e-mail address, you are no longer eligible to suppress your account statements…"

"Suppress" our account statements?  What country was this task outsourced to?  Didn't they mean "access".  And why so wordy? 

I have a Monster iCarPlay FM transmitter that I use to play podcasts in the car.  Somehow the tuning goes out of whack and I have difficulty finding a unused frequency.  I know I have the instructions buried somewhere, but I could not find them in the car.

I went to the monster.com to look for the instructions, but all I found was a flyer (called instructions or directions).  It described what one could do but not how to do it.

With a few more searches, I found the PDF of exactly just the piece of paper I can't find.  But it was not at monster.com!  I put those directions on my iPhone and will use them next time I want to drive and listen to a podcast.

I think I dealt with  a couple of other websites or programs that did not operate as one would expect, but it has been such a hectic day, I can't remember what they were.  Oh, yeah!  Blogger "crashed" on me while I was posting a blog entry.  At least, it didn't lose any of my text.

Corporate efficiency - unwanted, unreceived new card

I received a letter from Elan that my Visa card had been upgraded with all these new "super" features, none of which I really needed or wanted.  The letter stated that I should have already received my card and all I needed to do was activate it.

The problem was that I never received the card.  If I did, I might have thrown it out knowingly or unknowingly, but I doubt it.

Then I received an email touting all the benefits of the new card.  That was ten days ago.  I sent email to the local branch manager of the bank that issued the card; she replied she would check on it and asked me to call at the end of the week if I still had not received it.  I did not receive the card by Friday

Today I talked with somebody in the main office of the bank and she said they would request a new card for me and I should have it Wednesday.  Elan would charge a $15 lost card fee but the bank would give me credit for it.

Now I'm going to have to go through all the organizations that I have authorized to debit my credit card automatically and change my account number.  What a nuisance!

So, why did Elan decide I should have something that I didn't ask for?  Are they hoping that the "rewards" offered with the card would induce me to spend more?  I suppose lots of people will be overjoyed to be upgraded.

I guess the upside is that I can use the points to pay on the balance.  The mischievous part of me wants to use it every month.  Let's see, a $100 balance would give me 100 points.  Would that be a dollar, a dime, or a penny?  It reminds me of the people who overpaid charge card bills by one cent because they were not getting any response from the store about a problem.  A clerk processing the checks would notice, but a computer processing thousands of electronic payments would probably not notice.

Well, the computer might notice and send a message to somebody, but since so many companies won't allow spaces in a keyed-in card number, would any take the time to put in such a filter?

My computer reads my mind!

An annoying "feature" of Microsoft Excel for the Mac 2011 is that it will, without seeming cause, open a workbook at almost full screen rather than at the last size I closed it.

As I opened a worksheet a few minutes ago, I thought about this problem.  Sure enough, the workbook opened as almost full screen rather than the "tidy" size I last closed it at.

Another reminder that large corporations are not as efficient as many would like to believe.

Of course, I should remember that I do a lot of useful stuff with Excel, but it would be a little bit more comforting if its behavior was consistent and accurate.

Why facebook's stock price went down after the IPO

Simply put, facebook's software is too buggy!

Yesterday, I used my iPod and Safari to access facebook.  I could not log off!  There was no button to do so, and no button gave a drop down menu with log off in the list.  When I tried using my MacBook Pro to access facebook, I could log on, but then my news feed was blank.  Sometimes I would get a blank area and sometimes I would get a blank area with a spinning ball next to an arrow.

Then today I had three symbols at the top of the iPod window in addition to the three bars, which had done nothing before.  One of the symbols had a red number one.  It was that I had a message or a like.  The three bars now had a drop down menu.  Way, way at the bottom of the more than screen-length list was log out (or log off).  Dumbly, I didn't click on log out but clicked on the button with the number.  I found out that two people liked an entry.  Now the three bar menu had no drop down menu!!!

I used my wife's computer to like an item on my facebook page.  After several attempts of turning my iPod off and on and other screen changing actions, the three additional buttons were shown on my iPod.  I didn't click on them but went straight to the three bar button, scrolled down to log off, and clicked it.

Poof! I was now back to the facebook log on page.  Close that window and be rid of it!

I went back to my laptop and logged in to facebook.  I now had news feeds, but only a handful from today or last night.  I could find no button to look at older items.  That means I can't go back to an item that I only glanced at yesterday or that I want to check for additional comments.  Up to yesterday, I could look at a week or more of news items.

This is corporate efficiency?

Of course, buggy software does not really correlate to stock price.  Look at the way Apple stock has risen since the release of its latest operating system, OS X Lion.  Apple announced Lion with great fanfare and the claim that it had 250 exciting new features.  What they didn't say there were 300 features that no longer worked or didn't work as well as before.  OK, 300 features is poetic license, but I run into annoyances every day.  Clicks that don't work on the first try, watching the beach ball spin more than I have in previous versions, resets that later revert to an older setting, and on and on.

Whatever happened to "the computer for the rest of us"?  Gosh, and I was once a programmer, have been using Macs since 1984, and I have a hard time!

The next time somebody gives a favorable comparison of private enterprise to government; ask them if their computer does everything they want as easily as they want as fast as they want.

See also "Why Apple's stock price went down".