No Access

I can’t say this enough: Details are important. When you provide a service to your customers, it’s the little things that are so vitally important.

Case in point…

One of my birthday gifts this year was an All Access Visa gift card — a good gift for me because I tend to be hard to buy for. I had used it once, and when I went to use it again this past week it was declined because the balance wasn’t sufficient for the full purchase.

Now, right here we’ve hit a flaw in the system. I don’t know the balance and the cashier has no way to look it up, for security reasons. Why? I understand why they shouldn’t be able to look up my balance on a standard credit or debit card, but this is a gift card. It has the original amount printed right on the front of it, and it is not reloadable. Just by looking at it you know the balance is less than or equal to its stated dollar amount. Well, you say, it’s treated just like a credit card. And, right there, we have the problem: It works like a credit card, but it is not one. And rather than program for a completely new type of card we just shackle ourselves with unnecessary rules.

Yesterday, I decided to look up the balance so I could use this card once and for all. The back of the credit card lists a web site and a 1-800 number for balance inquiries. I decided, for the fun of it, to try both at the same time and see which was fastest. Yes, that sort of thing is fun to me. The phone system was first to let me enter my number but because of all the things it had to tell me about — one of which was that I could be looking this up on their web site — it didn’t give me my balance until after it had appeared on my screen.

And the two numbers were different.

The friendly phone voice said I could press 2 to hear my recent transactions, so I did. Sure enough, on March 25 I spent $.50 on a balance inquiry. I reloaded the web page and now it was there, as well: $.50, Balance Inquiry - IVR. They had charged me $.50 to use their 1-800 number.

I looked at the card again. No mention there of a fee, only the URL and the phone number listed together, seemingly as equals. I checked the FAQ. Same thing.

Now, $.50 is not that big a deal, especially when it was a gift. If that is the policy of “Inter National Bank” then so be it. But, I think they should tell people and not pretend like using the web site and calling the phone number are the same thing. That’s why I decided to see if I could submit a complaint.

I clicked on the Customer Service link hoping to find a contact form. Sure enough, it took me straight to one. “Dispute transactions on card” seemed the best fit for my complaint. I filled out the form, leaving the “Alternate phone number” field blank because I don’t like to give random companies my cell phone number. I put the following message in the “More Info” text box:

I just wanted to file a quick complaint. I just called your 1-800 number to get the balance of my card. No where on my card does it say this will cost me $.50. The IVR did not tell me it would cost $.50. You really should notify your customers that you are going to charge them a fee for a service nearly every other company offers for free.

I don’t expect a refund — I’m going to use up the rest of this card today and throw it away. I simply wanted to register a complaint. It’s a ridiculous fee, but if you are going to do it, you should notify your customers before they get charged.

I hit submit, and was presented with this:

Oh dear, I apparently made their web site cry. If you haven’t looked at their form yet, please do so now. Do you see any indication of which fields are required and which ones are not? No, you don’t, because there isn’t any. And that’s not because all fields are required — card number, security code, and more info are the only fields that are not required. Now, think about that for a second. The only fields not required are the ones that would provide them with information about why you are contacting them.

I decided perhaps it was my use of dashes that was the problem. I like to use dashes, but not everyone is as fond of them as I am. So, I tried this:

I just wanted to file a quick complaint. I just called your 1 800 number to get the balance of my card. No where on my card does it say this will cost me $.50. The IVR did not tell me it would cost $.50. You really should notify your customers that you are going to charge them a fee for a service nearly every other company offers for free.

I don’t expect a refund. I’m going to use up the rest of this card today and throw it away. I simply wanted to register a complaint. It’s a ridiculous fee, but if you are going to do it, you should notify your customers before they get charged.

And, since I have to submit this form again, I will register more complaints. First, the little faces on the top of the form are stupid and do not convey any real information to your users about what is going on with their submission. Second, there is no indicator on this form of what fields are required and which ones are not. Third, this error message is very unhelpful: “The text under ‘More Info’ has unrecognized characters… please remove them.” Perhaps you could tell the user what characters are
 allowed?

Nope:

Ok, maybe it’s the quotes. Single and double quotes can cause problems in a database if you don’t know what you’re doing. So, I got rid of the quotes.

I just wanted to file a quick complaint. I just called your 1 800 number to get the balance of my card. No where on my card does it say this will cost me $.50. The IVR did not tell me it would cost $.50. You really should notify your customers that you are going to charge them a fee for a service nearly every other company offers for free.

I do not expect a refund. I am going to use up the rest of this card today and throw it away. I simply wanted to register a complaint. It is a ridiculous fee, but if you are going to do it, you should notify your customers before they get charged.

And, since I have to submit this form again, I will register more complaints. First, the little faces on the top of the form are stupid and do not convey any real information to your users about what is going on with their submission. Second, there is no indicator on this form of what fields are required and which ones are not. Third, this error message is very unhelpful:

The text under More Info has unrecognized characters… please remove them.

Perhaps you could tell the user what characters are allowed?

What do you think of that, Web Form Guy?

He still didn’t like it. I went through a few more iterations, removing colons, blank lines, and dollar signs. I hoped the dollar signs weren’t the problem. Seems to me, if one is complaining about a transaction on a gift card that currency might just come up.

At this point, I decided perhaps the problem was me. Or, more specifically, the Linux computer I was using. Perhaps it was sending the information in some standard character set that Inter National Bank does not understand. I stepped over to my Windows computer and filled out the form from there. I restored some of the characters I had already removed — if this did fix the problem, I wanted them to receive my message as it was meant to be.

Web Form Guy was starting to look more angry than sad. I stripped out the characters I had removed before and tried again.

Ok, maybe the problem is Firefox. I switched to Internet Explorer and tried again. I no longer cared about filing a complaint, I just wanted to finish troubleshooting this thing.

I was starting to understand why the phone call cost fifty cents — unlike the web site, it worked. I pressed on, removing all numbers. Again, this seems like a problem for a bank:

I just wanted to file a complaint. I just called your one eight hundred number to get the balance of my card. No where on my card does it say this will cost me fifty cents. The IVR did not tell me it would cost fifty cents. You really should notify your customers that you are going to charge them a fee for a service nearly every other company offers for free. I do not expect a refund. I am going to use up the rest of this card today and throw it away. I simply wanted to register a complaint. It is a rediculous fee, but if you are going to do it, you should notify your customers before they get charged. And, since I have to submit this form again, I will register more complaints. First, the little faces on the top of the form are stupid and do not convey any real information to your users about what is going on with their
submission. Second, there is no indicator on this form of what fields are required and which ones are not. Third, this error message is very unhelpful. The text under More Info has unrecognized characters please remove them. Perhaps you could tell the user what characters are allowed?

No good. You’ll notice I gave up on this being a “quick” complaint.

I had only one thing left to try:

I just wanted to file a complaint STOP I just called your one eight hundred number to get the balance of my card STOP No where on my card does it say this will cost me fifty cents STOP The IVR did not tell me it would cost fifty cents STOP You really should notify your customers that you are going to charge them a fee for a service nearly every other company offers for free STOP I do not expect a refund PAUSE I am going to use up this card today and throw it away STOP I simply wanted to register a complaint STOP It is a ridiculous fee PAUSE but if you are going to do it PAUSE you should notify your customers before the get charged STOP And PAUSE since I have to submit this form again PAUSE I will register more complaints STOP First PAUSE the little faces on the top of the form are stupid and do not convey any real information to your users about what is going on with their submission STOP Second PAUSE there is no indicator on this form of what fields are required and which ones are not STOP Third PAUSE this error message is very unhelpful STOP The text under More Info has unrecognized characters please remove them STOP Perhaps you could tell the user what characters are allowed STOP Fourth PAUSE any form that cannot handle simple punctuation and numbers is flat out broken STOP

If I received the same error this time I was fully prepared to start removing letters one by one. I hit submit… and that finally did it. By “did it” I mean it caused a system error. Web Form Guy recommended I call customer service. I also think he flipped me off, but I may have just imagined that. I considered calling them, but I was afraid they would charge me a buck for it. As far as I’m concerned, they can keep my fifty cents. They can put it toward buying a new form.

And what have we learned from this? First, that details are important — little things, like allowing punctuation in your web forms. Or allowing your web form to submit, for that matter.

We’ve also learned that being an obsessive-compulsive web developer can lead to many lost weekends. But, we already knew that.