Your process or mine?

I had some fraud on my cred­it card the oth­er day. My expe­ri­ence resolv­ing it is a great exam­ple of how to think about cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. It’s eas­i­ly under­stood using the lan­guage of jobs-to-be-done, but I find it more inter­est­ing to have a human look at my expe­ri­ence to under­stand where the bank can improve.

I don’t believe this is symp­to­matic of my par­tic­u­lar bank… rather it’s a symp­tom of the way tra­di­tion­al com­pa­nies find it dif­fi­cult to think dif­fer­ent­ly about how they deliv­er val­ue and exe­cute giv­en a mod­ern expe­ri­ence-focused mar­ket con­text.

Before I ana­lyze my expe­ri­ence, let me share a rel­a­tive­ly recent true-cus­tomer sto­ry.

Determining ROI for an API

The cus­tomer, also a bank, had a high-vis­i­bil­i­ty, tight-dead­line project to deliv­er an API for one of their appli­ca­tions. The bank’s cus­tomers of this par­tic­u­lar appli­ca­tion had been get­ting data out of their appli­ca­tion by scrap­ing web pages (a tech­nique that’s both bad for the bank and the cus­tomer).

Final­ly, one large cus­tomer threat­ened to leave if they could­n’t get direct access to the data (via an API).

I was at din­ner with the cus­tomer after a day spent under­stand­ing their con­straints and some of the issues they were hav­ing. In par­tic­u­lar, they were try­ing to deliv­er a secure API and an API devel­op­er por­tal for cus­tomers. As we got to talk­ing, they men­tioned that they had been aware of their cus­tomers’ need for some time, but could­n’t fig­ure out an ROI for deliv­er­ing an API. After all, it’s not an ‘upcharge’ to the cus­tomer and once deliv­er­ing the impli­ca­tion is that (1) there would be long term sup­port for the API, and (2) there would be help pro­vid­ed by the bank to cus­tomers to under­stand how to use it well.

It was only when the cus­tomer threat­ened to leave that the bank was forced to deliv­er, hence the tight time-frame.

It turns out, the bank is aware of oth­er cus­tomers using oth­er of their appli­ca­tions with the same need for an API. Appli­ca­tions where they had a sim­i­lar dif­fi­cul­ty com­ing up with an ROI to jus­ti­fy an API pro­gram.

I asked the obvi­ous ques­tion (you know what I’m about to type, right?)…

Now that you’re doing the first API because a cus­tomer threat­ened to leave, are you going to do the oth­er APIs with­out first try­ing to fig­ure out an ROI? After all, you don’t want to wait until the cus­tomers get so upset they threat­en to leave. Right?

I got a sheep­ish grin, and defin­i­tive “No, we’re going to wait until they threat­en to leave.”

Real­ize, these were exec­u­tive meet­ings, not low-lev­el devel­op­ers. These were the peo­ple that could make these deci­sions… yet they were behold­en to an old mod­el of mea­sur­ing return on invest­ment that clear­ly was­n’t work­ing for this aspect of their busi­ness.

I’ve writ­ten about the chal­lenge to exist­ing ROI method­olo­gies before (using Delta’s mobile app as an exam­ple), but as an observ­er. In this case, I was lit­er­al­ly talk­ing to the peo­ple mak­ing deci­sions, and not deci­sions in abstract. They wait­ed until a cus­tomer threat­ened to leave, were flail­ing to meet time­lines as a result, and saw par­al­lel sit­u­a­tions with oth­er appli­ca­tions and yet were still stick­ing to their old way of think­ing.

It stuck with me. Frankly, I get frus­trat­ed. Not at the cus­tomer. I get frus­trat­ed because I have a pic­ture in my head and I’m not com­mu­ni­cat­ing it well enough to get people/companies to change their behav­iors. And, it’s with this in mind that I expe­ri­enced my own bank’s cred­it card fraud process this past week.

Their Process (The Bank’s Jobs)

It is, in fact, bet­ter than it had been.

When they detect fraud, I get a text mes­sage. If I reply that I don’t rec­og­nize the trans­ac­tion my card is shut down to pre­vent fur­ther fraud.

I can imag­ine the inter­nal con­ver­sa­tions talk­ing about rel­e­vant tech­nolo­gies:

1. Improve fraud detec­tion. Using AI (pre­sum­ably, though it’s most like­ly Com­plex Event Pro­cess­ing and sim­ple rules… more on that when it comes to my job) to detect fraud improves detec­tion
2. Low­er cost of fraud iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. Real time mes­sag­ing for inter­act­ing with cus­tomers and there­by sav­ing call-cen­ter costs because they need few­er cus­tomer ser­vice peo­ple to call and inves­ti­gate fraud­u­lent-appear­ing trans­ac­tions
3. Min­i­mize fraud once iden­ti­fied. Instant­ly shut­ting down cards to pre­vent fraud loss­es (for inter­na­tion­al read­ers, not sure if it’s the same every­where, but in the US the banks are respon­si­ble for cred­it card fraud, not con­sumers)

This is all good… for the bank. After all, they’re the ones that bear the bur­den of call-cen­ter costs. They’re the ones that bear the cost of fraud. Detect­ing fraud more accu­rate­ly, low­er­ing the cost of inves­ti­gat­ing whether it’s actu­al­ly fraud, and pre­vent­ing more fraud on com­pro­mised cards… all jobs for the bank. Which prob­a­bly explains why my expe­ri­ence (as a cus­tomer) was so incred­i­bly bad.

How the Process Failed the Customer

Let’s see where their process failed me:

1. After I respond­ed to the ini­tial text, they put the bur­den on me by tex­ting me to call their cus­tomer cen­ter. (I did not, I have oth­er cred­it cards)
2. I had no idea what was going on… it’s fair to assume that if they detect fraud and shut down my card, that they’re going to send me new ones (they did not)
3. Two oth­er fam­i­ly mem­bers using the same card were not noti­fied that their cards were shut down as well (there were two oth­er cards, which meant that I briefly became a fam­i­ly bud­get help desk since we use dif­fer­ent cards for dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of spend­ing and want to keep our bud­get­ing straight)
4. About a day lat­er, I got a phone call from their fraud depart­ment com­put­er… a com­put­er that then put me on hold when I indi­cat­ed I want­ed to talk about the fraud. After 5 min­utes on a com­put­er gen­er­at­ed hold, I hung up, frus­trat­ed.
5. A day lat­er I called to resolve the issue. I was passed around to three or four dif­fer­ent peo­ple because only cer­tain peo­ple can deal with fraud. Each time, I had to repeat myself and answer secu­ri­ty the­ater ques­tions. This was espe­cial­ly frus­trat­ing because:
   • It was a Sat­ur­day morn­ing, time I should be spend­ing with my fam­i­ly
   • The day before Mar­riott announced a breach and all the infor­ma­tion they were using to “ver­i­fy my iden­ti­ty” were caught up in the breach so I real­ized that this was a ridicu­lous exer­cise. You may think that I should give them a break, after all how would my bank know if I was a Mar­riott cus­tomer? Well, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, my bank knows I’m a Mar­riott cus­tomer because I use their Mar­riott cred­it card. (So, no AI… most­ly like­ly silo-ed rules based on the bank’s deter­mi­na­tion of fraud, not AI based on my behav­ior.)
   • Call cen­ter peo­ple were patron­iz­ing­ly sweet with their “what can I do to help?” when appar­ent­ly all most of them can do is trans­fer a phone line.
6. It turns out, even though I even­tu­al­ly got frus­trat­ed and hung up, I did get far along enough in the process to have my cards replaced. I did not get any noti­fi­ca­tion that this was the case, though when I looked in my Apple Wal­let I did see that the last four dig­its of the cred­it card in my wal­let had changed.
7. Not know­ing what was going on, I called again on Mon­day. After 30 min­utes I got through to some­one who could help me and share that every­thing was tak­en care of… and that new fraud­u­lent charges that I noticed were removed from my account.

I want you to keep in mind, not only am I a cus­tomer… I’m what’s con­sid­ered a Pri­vate Client. Mean­ing, pre­sum­ably, I’d have bet­ter ser­vice than non-Pri­vate Clients. What I’m describ­ing to you is this bank’s pre­mier ser­vice.

The Jobs I Needed Done

In the course of my hour or so on the phone with the bank, I fine tuned my pitch.

I need­ed help with three things:

1. Replace­ment cards for all cards impact­ed (and con­fir­ma­tion / deliv­ery time­frames)
2. Con­ti­nu­ity with exist­ing recur­ring pay­ments (the real rea­son I called on Mon­day was because as it was the end of the month, some recur­ring charges were fail­ing and I was going to have to track down all the places I used this card and update it)
3. Removal of fraud­u­lent charges (I noticed two new ones that I had­n’t seen before)

With respect to #1 above… once the cards were shut down, I (and oth­er card hold­ers) should sim­ply have been sent a mes­sage that said “replace­ment cards were sent, they’ll arrive on X day.”

Why leave me hang­ing with uncer­tain­ty?

With respect to #2, I sus­pect this is the most dif­fi­cult of the three requests I had. Obvi­ous­ly, the bur­den of updat­ing all of these (and any fees I incur for late pay­ments) is on me. How­ev­er, this is not an unsolv­able prob­lem… because of my expe­ri­ence with Apple Wal­let. The card in there is updat­ed auto­mat­i­cal­ly. That means, if I use, for exam­ple, Uber, I can instant­ly use Uber using that card — which remem­ber, rep­re­sents one of my fam­i­ly’s bud­get envelopes so it’s impor­tant to me not to have to use anoth­er card. So, if they can update Apple Pay auto­mat­i­cal­ly, why can’t they update my chil­dren’s swim­ming pool account? (I know why, but not why they’re not work­ing on solv­ing this prob­lem.)

That said, if they’re focus­ing on my job, this is some­thing they’d try to solve.

Final­ly, #3… there were two charges for some­thing I’ve nev­er charged before… at a place that I have nev­er charged some­thing before. There were oth­er charges that they ques­tioned me about, though they were charges at places that I charge at almost every day (the local Whole Foods).

Could­n’t they present me with a check­list of sus­pect trans­ac­tions, and a URL where I can quick­ly take a look and help them iden­ti­fy the trans­ac­tions that did­n’t look right? Maybe they could rank them and have a shad­ed red/yellow/green back­ground behind the list so it’s easy for me to help them?

Along those lines with respect to item #2 above, why can’t they keep that card alive for any charges that have hap­pened in the past… and then send me a noti­fi­ca­tion in a month about which recur­ring pay­ments I need­ed to tran­si­tion to the new card?

This isn’t com­plex. Most of what I’m sug­gest­ing uses sim­ple exist­ing tech­nolo­gies (does­n’t require fan­cy AI or blockchain, or any­thing). Frankly, it’s sim­ply about whether they care enough about my job or whether they’re self­ish­ly only con­sid­er­ing their own.

The Business Impact

The banks know how hard it is to change accounts. There’s also quite a lot of lock-in. I want­ed that spe­cif­ic rewards card so there real­ly isn’t much sub­sti­tu­tion in that regard. So in fact, it may be “good busi­ness” to not spend mon­ey on my jobs con­sid­er­ing that it’s going to take a very high lev­el of dis­sat­is­fac­tion for me to leave.

That said let’s think about two ele­ments of the bank’s busi­ness once again.

1. Top of Wallet

“Top of Wal­let” is a phrase the retail cred­it card indus­try uses to express their busi­ness goal of becom­ing the card their cus­tomers uses first for any trans­ac­tion.

These com­pa­nies pay hun­dreds of dol­lars (in mar­ket­ing spend) per cus­tomer to win the top of wal­let space; and the dif­fer­ence between being top of wal­let or not can be mea­sured. This is some­thing the busi­ness side of cards under­stands.

Well, the longer it takes for fraud to get resolved, the longer there is a chance for the cus­tomer to devel­op a habit to use a dif­fer­ent card. They spend so much mon­ey to win these cus­tomers’ top spots, and then are will­ing to give it away by not pay­ing atten­tion to the cus­tomers’ point-of-view of their fraud process.

It real­ly blows me away to see this dis­con­nect between the busi­ness and the tech­nol­o­gy, when there’s such a dis­crete set of busi­ness mea­sure­ments to the busi­ness for the impact.

Even if I’m using anoth­er card, there’s oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­nect with the cus­tomer around this… imag­ine if every day that this was ongo­ing I got an authen­ti­cal­ly-con­struc­tive mes­sage from the bank:

• “We detect­ed fraud, new cards are on the way you should have them Mon­day.”
• “Hey, it’s Mon­day. Your cards were deliv­ered, please have a look for them and acti­vate them.”
• “I see you’ve acti­vat­ed them, is every­thing work­ing ok? Let us know, and we’ll give you a shout to help if not.”
• “You just got a recur­ring pay­ment request… we’ve approved it because we know the ven­dor and the amount is sim­i­lar to the past, but please update the pay­ment card on your kid­s’s swim­ming lessons.”

None of this would be hard, and it adds a real human touch to show me that the bank has empa­thy with the dis­rup­tion this has caused me and is going to make sure they do what they can.

2. Digital Wallets Are “Better” Than Physical Cards

Def­i­n­i­tion of bet­ter?

• More secure
• Instant replace­ment
• Faster at retail point-of-sale
• For dig­i­tal com­merce, improves shop­ping cart expe­ri­ence
• When a phys­i­cal card is lost, there’s an instant oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate new con­sumer habits around dig­i­tal wal­let use.
• The main ben­e­fit to the bank is that it helps with the top of wal­let issue… cus­tomers who lose their cards can use their phone to pay with their new card instant­ly.

Let’s look at the sec­ond bul­let above, because this has always screamed “OPPORTUNITY!!!” to me.

I have my cred­it card in my Apple Wal­let. The phys­i­cal card is lost or stolen. I call for a replace­ment to be sent. By the time I’m off the phone with the bank, a new “card” is already con­fig­ured in my dig­i­tal wal­let and ready to go (at least on Apple Pay).

With instant replace­ment via a dig­i­tal wal­let, los­ing a card (to fraud or oth­er­wise) reduces the oppor­tu­ni­ty for the cus­tomer to use a com­pet­i­tive card… assum­ing they’re aware and will­ing to try a new behav­ior.

Talk to the busi­ness and they’ll tell you that behav­ioral changes are a risky time for estab­lished ven­dors (or oppor­tunis­tic times for enter­pris­ing ven­dors).

Why not own the behav­ioral change by using the replace­ment card process as the oppor­tu­ni­ty to influ­ence the adop­tion of the new behav­ior?

This is such an impor­tant (and obvi­ous) ques­tion.

Cus­tomer ser­vice should coach cus­tomers through this behav­ioral change because it ben­e­fits the cus­tomer and the bank. A bank could even offer a small finan­cial incen­tive (for exam­ple, $10 pur­chase cred­it) if the cus­tomer is new to dig­i­tal pay­ments and uses it before the replace­ment card is acti­vat­ed. $10 is small when it comes to vying for top of wal­let place­ment.

A Place for Empathy

This post is long enough. As with many oth­ers, I write for myself as much as for any­one who stum­bles on this. Espe­cial­ly at 2500+ words! A post like this helps me under­stand what I’ve expe­ri­enced and feeds into the sales and thought lead­er­ship method­ol­o­gy I’ve cre­at­ed over at Pre­sales Sen­sei.

In clos­ing, I would like to point out the impor­tance of empa­thy on a prod­uct or mar­ket­ing team. It seems obvi­ous, but com­pa­nies will have per­sona own­ers and prod­uct own­ers, but how do those roles do when it comes to empa­thy for their cus­tomers?

I believe empa­thy is a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of the process as com­pa­nies try to become more cus­tomer expe­ri­ence dri­ven. It’s impor­tant to con­sid­er cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, yet so often as the con­ver­sa­tion moves to improv­ing expe­ri­ence, it shifts from cus­tomer expe­ri­ence to user expe­ri­ence (UI design). Crazy stuff, and so obvi­ous.

Giv­en my expe­ri­ence, I’m hard pressed to believe my bank even con­sid­ers me at all.