Ameriprise Customer Service – Honesty

I recently signed up with Ameriprise Financial Services and last week I worked on setting up my new Ameriprise accounts in Quicken.

At first it was a bit of a hassle as you have to setup your online accounts 2x – first as a financial account and then as a brokerage account.  But once that was setup – everything downloaded into quicken and I was happy to have all my financial accounts in order.

But a day later when I went to download all the updated information into Quicken – the download from my bank and my credit cards all worked.  The download from Ameriprise yielded error messages.  I followed the usual troubleshooting

• First you try again to make sure it really isn’t working
• Then you try again at a different day/time to see if it is a temporary problem
• Then you reset all the accounts to default settings and try again

I did all of the above and still every account worked – except Ameriprise.  So, yesterday I had time to call Ameriprise technical support.  Or, I should say, I had time to be amazed.

After the usual questions to make sure I had rights to the account, the representative asked what the problem is.  I gave a quick summary and he asked me to read the error message.  Halfway through he started reading along with me.  Immediately I knew it was not just me.

And here was the priceless answer – “Sir, that is a problem on our end.  It just starting occurring within the last few days.  There is nothing you are doing wrong.  We’re sorry for the inconvenience”  Literally in one breathe he hit everything:

• The knowledge sharing at Ameriprise was great – he knew about the issue.  No time on hold, no looking for a “senior” rep!
• He gave me the gosh darn honest truth.  “It’s our (Ameriprise’s) fault.”   No BS.  No blaming Quicken.  No blaming Microsoft.
• He apologized

Then he asked – “If you have a moment I can walk you through emailing a log file from your PC that will help our team troubleshoot.”  He ended the call with “I will contact you again tomorrow, how would you like us to contact you.”  When I said my cell number was fine he asked “In case you don’t answer, Is it okay to leave a message on your voice mail or would you prefer I call back.”  I said a message was okay and we finished up.

Today – as promised – I received a call and then a voice mail telling me that the log file was received, the research was continuing.  They were sorry the issue was not resolved yet but they would call when there was resolution.

And you know what – I believe them.  I know that I really will get a call when it is fixed and I don’t need to do anything but wait.  I’m not mad about it the downloading being broken.  Sure there is an inconvenience – but why be mad when Ameriprise admitted the error and provided such great service.

Take the keyboard away from the geek

When will they ever learn.  i got this email from Dailyink.com regarding an outage.  They highlight a “DNS malfunction.”  What percentage of their readers to they think will know what a “DNS” is!

Yahoo Customer Service – The perils of automation

Okay, so let’s start this out with the confession right up front.  My Yahoo account is old – I’ve had it for as long as Yahoo has had accounts.  I went in to cleanup my profile and update the password.  I cleaned up way too well and locked myself out of the account.  No fault on Yahoo – I was multi-tasking and messed up.

Once my login failed I tried to do the online password recovery but I was notified that I had to contact Yahoo customer support.  So here was the first error Yahoo made.

What they do

• Display an on screen message said tells customer to contact customer support
• Customer has to link over to customer support pages
• Customer has to find link to write in – since none of the online FAQs will help
• Customer has to write message

What they could do to make support better

• Display an on screen message said tells customer to contact customer  support and write on that page include the entry screen for the email
• Customer has to write message

Now, lets move to the next step.  In response to my query I got three emails

1. From: Yahoo!
   Subject: Account Termination
   Time: 12:37
2. From: Yahoo! Member Services
   Subject: Your new requested Yahoo! password. Please reset your password now.
   Time 12:38
3. From: Yahoo! Member Services
   Subject: Re: Sign in & Registration – I need my password reset  (KMM130153980V9226L0KM)
   Time: 12:44

The good news is Yahoo quickly addressed and fixed my issue.  The bad news is that my email checks for messages every five minutes.  At 12:37 it checked and I got the automated message saying my account was terminated!  In the midst of cursing and screaming I checked my email again and at 12:40 I got the automated email telling me how to reset my password.  I followed the instructions and got my account reset and was happy.  At 12:47 I got the message, the human message from the rep, telling me that I would get a message on how to reset – no mention was made of the email on “account termination.”

So – in the end I got my issue resolved – but I certainly did not have a good experience!  Some simple process fixes by Customer Service could make sure that I got the issue resolved and had a good experience.

eBay & PayPal – Customer Service Gap

I got an email message from eBay this AM that amazed me.  eBay identified fraud – and gave me instructions on all the work I had to do with PayPal to get this cleared up.   REAL customer service would have been for eBay to simply complete the process and not require me to do any work!

Here’s the message from eBay (with minor editing for privacy):

We’re writing to let you know that the listing for the following item you bid on has been removed:

260264719XXX -  Gift Card Certificate with Free Shipping

We strongly recommend that you do not complete this purchase. Purchases of items listed on eBay but then completed outside of eBay are extremely risky. They are not covered by eBay buyer protection programs and are highly susceptible to fraud.

[They have instructions for other payment methods which I deleted to keep this shorter]

If you paid with PayPal, you may be eligible for up to $2,000 USD coverage at no cost.
1. Log in to your PayPal account.
2. Click the “Resolution Center” tab at the top of the page.
3. Click the “Report a Problem” link.
4. Select “Item Dispute” and click continue. Follow the directions to open a dispute and escalate to a claim.

PayPal claims must be filed within 45 days of the close of the listing. It can take 30 days or more to complete the investigation and resolve the dispute.

So here is what amazes me

• eBay knows I paid via PayPal – up until the moment they deleted the posting they had that fact displayed in my eBay summary.
  • So why encourage me not to pay – you know I already paid!
  • So why mention cash, check and Western Union – you know I used Paypal!
  • So why give me instructions on how to dispute the issue – why can’t eBay do that – they have all the data.
  • eBay has facts that led them to turn off the auction – but I have to wait 30 days to get this completed???

Okay fine, maybe there is a chance that eBay is wrong and I will really get the product – but if eBay had done all the work for me – all I would have to do is close the dispute which eBay automatically kicked off.  In that case, I would see all the help eBay gave me and all I would have to do is login once and close the dispute versus all the above steps plus more not even shown!

Very disappointing service – if PayPal and eBay had just merged I could see this – but the merger was years ago.  This separate service approach is far below the standards I have come to expect from eBay.

GoDaddy Customer Service

When I realized how easy WordPress was and how you could setup pages in addition to posts I decided to have my domain (davidsilversmith.com) forward to this blog (internetmuse.com).  So I logged into my GoDaddy account and setup the forwarding.

As with many things, what seemed so easy actually led to a week of confusion, 4 email exchanges with GoDaddy and two phone calls with them.

What worked?

• Both times I called GoDaddy I was directed to a live agent within 1 minute – pretty impressive.
• The agents appeared to know their stuff and were pleasant to talk with – no geek speak or speaking down to me.
• When I said I was pretty experienced (I once ran a call center for an Internet Service Provider) the agent listened and then adjusted his approach
• The 2nd agent took the time to review my prior calls and prior changes that I had made – no snap judgments.

What, shall we say, sucked?

• Even while I rave about the service – I actually had to solve the issue on my own.  I found that I made an error in one of the DNS entries – something the agents could have and should have seen.
• Email responses were 100% canned.  You could see that the paragraphs were formally written canned answers that the agent plugged in.  In both case, the answers were only marginally related to my question.
• The agents made no use of the history or flow of the exchange.  This was classic focus on the activity (writing email, keeping response time down) and not focusing on the results – solving the customer’s issue!
  • I emailed them with question and included all my account info including 4 digit PIN
  • They emailed me canned answer
  • I rewrote my email highlighting the specifics which their canned answer did not address
  • They emailed me that to answer that question they would need my 4 digit PIN

I started with email support because it was not urgent and usually you wait on hold forever for a live agent.  It was a surprising experience for me to have positive results on the phone and such poor results on the email.  When done well, email support can be so much cheaper for the provider so while pleased as a customer with the support, from a Customer Service Management perspective I wonder about their structure.