A Simple Riddle

This is actu­ally the post I sat down to write yes­ter­day.

Work with me here…

Pre­tend  you’re a mer­chant. Say… Farm­ers Insur­ance. And, let’s say you had a pro­gram to make your billing eas­ier called “Auto Pay”. Auto Pay arguably offers more to you, as Farm­ers Insur­ance, than to your cus­tomers (oh yeah, it’s more con­ve­nient… right).

So, as Farm­ers Insur­ance you have my credit card… and every six months you sub­mit a pay­ment for my insur­ance pre­mium (six weeks prior to it being due by the way).

Now, here’s the riddle:

You have to sub­mit my name, credit card num­ber, expi­ra­tion date, and amount to the insur­ance com­pany. You see that the expi­ra­tion date is passed. You (pick one):

1. Call, email, text me to get updated credit card infor­ma­tion, or bet­ter yet, tell me how to self-service this change on your web­site, or
2. Sub­mit the infor­ma­tion you know is wrong any­ways, and when it bounces charge me $20 for the convenience.

Take your time, think… because it’s appar­ently not an obvi­ous choice.

Seri­ously, not only did this hap­pen but when I got the let­ter in the mail I saw that the card was expired and I called. It took me a week to make the call, but it was still over 4 weeks before my bill was due. When I called, I was informed there was a $20 penalty for a “returned payment”.

I swear, my response was “Wait, you sub­mit­ted expired credit card infor­ma­tion, were shocked when it bounced, and now are charg­ing me? Why didn’t you just call me?”

In short, there was “noth­ing she could do” until I threat­ened to go to AIG. Then, mag­i­cally there appeared a “pre­mium cus­tomer sup­port depart­ment” that had the author­ity to credit me back the charge.

The con­ver­sa­tion got quite funny after that (maybe not for her) but I won’t bore with the details here.

I’d rather talk about the approach I dis­cussed yes­ter­day though. An approach that Farm­ers could use to make sure they avoid prob­lems like these.

As part of the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence (the trans­ac­tion) there are sev­eral processes… among them the renewal process. There are sev­eral events that impact that trans­ac­tion (and the process)… the renewal event, credit card expi­ra­tion event, and so on. There are sup­port­ing processes, like cus­tomer noti­fi­ca­tion, and request updated infor­ma­tion. There are “non-event events” (things that don’t hap­pen that should, alert when they don’t hap­pen)… like “we’ve noti­fied the cus­tomer but they’ve not updated their infor­ma­tion” (or some­thing like that).

If Farm­ers Insur­ance approached their “busi­ness process automa­tion” respon­sively (and respon­si­bly), they’d look at the trans­ac­tions and the events that impact the process… not just the process itself.

Keep in mind, it’s not just the frus­tra­tion… my 15 minute call to the call cen­ter cost them money. Plus, they have fol­lowup (to credit me the improp­erly imposed fee). And, I removed myself from the Auto Pay so that I don’t have this prob­lem in two years again, but that also means that they’ll likely get paid just a cou­ple of days before the bill is due, instead of 6 weeks before.

And, on Auto Pay I hardly remem­ber I have car insur­ance. Now, every six months I’ll get to make the deci­sion… Do I pay Farm­ers? Or, do I shop around for a bet­ter price before I renew?

Think about what hap­pened today? I left Auto Pay, I have the thought of switch­ing providers in my head, I’ve had a bad expe­ri­ence (rightly or wrongly), I’ve still not paid my pre­mium, and I’ve made fun of Farm­ers online. I’d say this is a step back in our rela­tion­ship. What ven­dor, espe­cially when it’s just a click away to switch, wants to move rela­tion­ships back­wards? They should be mea­sur­ing my inter­ac­tion with them and con­stantly mak­ing sure we’re get­ting more tightly bound, not less.