Despite all the globalisation and internationalisation, a traveller cannot make a phone call because a global phone company was so insular that it presumed that the whole world had zip codes that were similar to the US standard. How can programmers and executives be so myopic to presume that zip codes are the same, the world over? How can computers send a rover to Mars, yet can’t acknowledge that I am a bona fide customer? For that reason, I had to have an American card from the USA, using the US system. And so I ended up with a Platinum Card well before the Platinum Card was launched in Australia. The annual membership at the time was around $900, I think. I never did see the benefit in it. Despite the grand promises of great assistance and contacts, I was disappointed. For example, I was in New York and noticed a show called, ‘A funny thing happened on the way to the forum.’ I had once seen the old movie by that name. It was such a wonderful movie, that I arranged for people to call every video retailer and ask for it. There were so many calls being made about this movie, that it was later released in Australia, perhaps on the thrust of the perceived demand! The show in New York City seemed like the perfect one for me to see. The show was sponsored by American Express. How about that! The Platinum Concierge service boasted a world-class facility to obtain tickets to all the grand events of the world. Sadly, Amex could not secure a ticket for me. So what’s the point of being a member, if Amex can’t obtain tickets to an Amex-sponsored show? Useless. I walked up to the theatre and purchased a ticket as easy as pie.

Another time I needed to be in Minneapolis or thereabouts for a television interview. I simply could not find anyone who could book a hotel room for me. Not a five-star. Not a four-star. No star at all. Every hotel room was taken due to a convention boasting 80,000 delegates. No rooms at all. So I called Amex. No luck. I called Hilton Honours. No luck. I called Qantas Travel. No Luck. I called Internet Travel. No Luck. I called Starwood Club. No luck. I called Hyatt Gold Passport or whatever it was called in those days. No Luck. What’s the point of all that metallic membership when no-one could help me? So, after all that VIP nonsense, I consulted the Yellow Pages and telephoned the first hotel that caught my eye. It was the Hilton. I dialled the number directly. And within two minutes my room was booked and confirmed. It makes you wonder how I managed to secure a room after one phone call, while no other VIP centre was able to assist. After a while, I cancelled my Platinum. I never knew how to extract value from it. One of the benefits was a stunning leather diary. A perk of membership. The diary would arrive on my desk in May of each year. How can that be useful? Sure, it takes a long time in the post, and such are the disadvantages of living so far away. But the sad fact was that the diary was post-marked March, each year. Another feature of the Platinum card was the promise of two business-class tickets for the price of one. I could not see the big deal, given that the prices were inflated. I just ignored it, and switched to Gold. Some years later, a cheque arrived from the USA, along with a legal letter, saying that a Class Action had taken place in the USA and all members were being refunded their fees, by court order, due to a judge finding that the two-for-one scheme had been deceptive or misleading, or something like that.

Anyway, that is all history now, because after twenty years as a member, I cut my cards in half and sent them to the home of the CEO. To read about the straw that broke a twenty-year relationship, click here.

My letter to the CEO read:

When I transact with a company for twenty years, and I write to its CEO, I expect a response from the CEO. I have found Amex insulting in this way, even when I was trying to assist it for its own good.

You personally ignored me when I wrote to you on 12 October 2009 saying, ‘This letter is the final straw’. I meant it, and here are the cards.

I do not expect organisations to be perfect. However, I do not appreciate seeing dozens of Amex ads, touting slogans that I know are false. As a member since 1989, I see the ads as rhetoric.

One of your ads takes the cake. It says, ‘Daniel: We see you as a person, not a number’. I doubt that very much.

During the past several months, I have been using a Visa card, and spending more than ever. So anyone who had seen my declined Amex usage and assumed that it was all due to the financial crisis, would have been mistaken. There is more than meets the eye.

Wishing you well for the new year.

Jonar Nader

That letter was sent by courier. It was received and signed-for on the 14th of December 2009. Sadly, now one month later, I have received no response. Perhaps the CEO was away, or super busy. Or maybe that is the culture through and through. Fearing that American Express had still not registered my request to cancel the card, I phoned and spoke with one person, who transferred me to another who was keen to retain my business. He offered all sorts of financial incentives, which I declined. ‘What do we have to do to keep you as a member?’ he asked. I explained that I was calling to close the account, and was not interested in bargaining. However, one of my issues was that no-one at Amex knew how to engage their brain when talking to me. I had a specific concern about one of its merchants who, in my assessment, was running a scam. He replied, ‘Would you please give us one more chance and allow me to arrange for a senior person to contact you to discuss your concerns?’

I agreed, and waited. No calls came. I chased this up and was told that two attempts were made. Alas, no messages and no clues and their calls show up as ‘Withheld’ in my caller ID. I receive dozens of missed calls daily. If messages aren’t left, I would never know who called. Anyway, despite my reminder, still no calls. So today, I called this Amex agent for the third time. Finally, a senior person phoned me, and I might as well have been talking to a brick wall. Completely unwilling and unable and uninterested in anything outside the norm. I was trying to point out a merchant who was running a scam. I was told that merchants, like card members, are valued customers.

Why bother arranging for a senior person to call me, after all this nonsense, when the person was not only powerless to act, but also incapable of understanding my concerns?

After twenty years with Amex, I had reached the end of my tether. And to think that a letter to the CEO receives no response, makes me wonder why anyone would bother with Amex these days. I must say that it was always a challenge to use the Amex card. Most retailers shunned the idea. Many would lie about their terminal not working, just so that they could discourage me from using it. Most retail establishments blatantly asked me to use Visa or MasterCard. Even if the CEO did not want to communicate with me, he should have forwarded my letter to the cancellation department for administrative purposes. Anyway, today, while really really cancelling my card and falling silent on the phone, just listening to the diatribe and saying, ‘I have nothing to say’ whenever the senior person paused for a response, he told me that my Gold annual membership had been charged, and that he will reverse that charge (as well he should). I also told him that I was happy to forfeit any remaining reward points.

The lesson in all of this?

1) Corporations need not saturate the market with advertising until they first work out the reasons behind the issues that plague them. To have to emphasise that Amex treats people as a person, not a number, raises more questions than it answers. Why did they think that the public thought that Amex treats people as numbers? Why must this point be made? Why tell us about it? Just go and treat people well. No need to advertise it. Just do it. Why would a corporation spend millions to advertise something that should never be uttered. What’s next? Ads to say that Amex cares about staff and the Pututu Beetle of the Trundrjanian Forest? Or 600 billboard across the city to say that Amex pays all its taxes? Or a $2 million campaign to say that Amex staff never sexually abuse young employees? Do you see how it would raise more questions that it would answer!

2) If you are going to make a promise, you had better be able to deliver on it. If a 20-year member cannot ever get a CEO to respond to a query, then either the CEO is way too busy, or the CEO does not care. Or the mail filtration system keeps the CEO in the dark a la ‘Yes Minister’. Perhaps I should wake up to the fact that a customer like me is not important enough. Modesty prevents me from telling you how much I might have spent with Amex over that period, but I dare say that it was considerable. Irrespective of the amount, and whether it’s one thousand or one million dollars, weak is the person who treats clients differently, based on their spending capacity. If a company cannot deliver the same level of service to all its clients, then it is a ‘using-abusing’ kind of sycophantic company that scatters fake smiles and manipulated courtesies.

3) If your staff can only regurgitate policy hogwash without really understanding the question, you would be better-off running a recorded message and getting rid of the humans. At least customers would not blame a machine for being unable to listen or to think or to communicate.

4) If you are going to record calls ‘for quality and assurance purposes’, you had better run a live feed to all the senior managers’ desktop computer so that managers can hear what’s going on, in real time. By the way, some time ago, an Amex staff member was so bad, I felt it necessary to complain about him, so I asked him, ‘What is the name of your manager?’ He gave me a name. It turned out that it was his own name. He lied to me so that if I were to write the letter to complain, it would have gone to him, and not his real manager. How sneaky. I twigged after I hung up. Oh, the many frustrations I have had with that company.

5) The funniest of all my interactions with Amex in the past two weeks (as well as during the past three years) were the endless queries about my date of birth and my password and my address and phone number and postal address etc. I kept telling them, dozens of times, every time, not to call me and other clients and ask for such private information. It is insane to call people and say, ‘Hi we are from American Express and we first need to verify you for security purposes and we will not budge and we will not help you until you break the very rule that we have made you swear and sign never to break — namely to tell a stranger over the phone your vital password which you must never divulge but please divulge it to me!’ And I could never get through to them.

Insatiable insanity!

P.S. For more about my Platinum Amexperiences, click here.

And before you cheer on, ask yourself if you are a shareholder in any way, via any means. If you are, and you have never taken this level of interest, then sell your shares and stop being a mug!

I called Citibank, asking if I could open a US checking (cheque) account. They could not help me. ‘Try the US branch,’ they advised. So I went on-line and filled in their form. It’s simple. I am from Sydney, Australia, and I need a US account. What do I need to do? So a reply came back that might as well have been written by fifty monkeys in a room whose walls are padded with computer keyboards. Just give the monkeys some tennis balls, and see which keys hit, and which keys register. Then, every thirty seconds, some software program can just press send. And there you have your answer. How stupid can organisations get? I explained that I am from Sydney, Australia, etc, but they advised me that I need to have a US Social Security Number and live in the US. And if I do not have appropriate US ID, I can go to a branch and present myself in person. From where do these people rent their brain cells? That might well be the requirements. However, I was asking a different question, and their response proves that they did not read my questions. They saw the words ‘US’ and ‘account’ and sent me the standard template. This is not called communications. Why ask so many questions when in the end, all I should have done was send them a three-word e-mail. ‘Hello, US account.’

By the way, in case anyone from Citibank is reading this, and you wish to look into this so that you can either sue me or serve me, here is the reference number you generated for me:

&392556B78E4060263C09082576A9000C7C593888ZSUNZDJUJ0NZDJUJECT&

The person writing to me was ‘Sincerely, MyCiti Online Customer Service’. Fancy that. That’s what I get in response to their questions, such as, ‘What is your name and your mother’s maiden name and your shoe size?’ They want to know everything about me, but when it comes to contacting me, they are nameless, while I remain:

&392556B78E4060263C09082576A9000C7C593888ZSUNZDJUJ0NZDJUJECT&

So I wrote back by pressing reply, which went to: autoreply.iewa@citicorp.com. It did not say NoReply, so I thought that there was some hope. Alas not. Within seconds, they wrote back saying: ‘Thank you for contacting us. For security reasons, this email address is not accepting mail. Please return to the Web page where you entered your original request or refer to the contact information listed on the original message that you received for any follow-up communication. Thank you!’

What security reasons? What a spasm. What an excuse. What a disgrace. Hey, I know all about software and automatic ticketing and call logging. I don’t care about that. If they have the cheek to have an email system, they should have the decency to catch up with the modern era and communicate via email. Oh, and why must everything go via their system? For logging? For archival? For training, monitoring, and quality assurance purposes? How stupid can anyone get?

Here is the lesson for the day!

1) Never send out an email where the recipient cannot press reply! Whatever is going through your mind about the trillions of reasons why this does not suit you, just stop. Dump it all out. Forget it. Not good enough.

2) Never send out an email where the sender is not identified by name and position.

3) When a customer responds to that specific name and position, never allocate the note to a ticketing system. Oh, the dozens of people I have had to deal with over one simple matter. Your help desk should remember that the word HELP is part of its name. It does not help the customer when agents receive a ticket, while they sit at home or with their feet up at a beach at Byron Bay, responding to tickets by shooting back questions and delaying the response to the poor customer. Help desk idiots, mostly ‘idiotified’ by their superiors and the Board, are paid to respond to tickets. What they say and how they say it, never seems to enter the equation. So they never answer a simple question. They just shoot back another question. In this way, they can say that they responded to a hundred tickets today. What a giggle-factory those help-desks are turning out to be. And the CEO is to blame, and the Board is responsible. And the shareholders ought to hang their head in shame. Where is all this quality assurance they keep telling me about every time they record my calls?

4) Never publicise a 24 hour help desk if the person taking the call is simply going to say, ‘Oh, please call back during business hours.’ Go to sleep and save me the bother. It’s like those doctors on radio who take calls, and anyone who phones in with a medical question is advised to consult their GP. Get off the air, people!

5) Never send out a letter where the person writing it, has no name, and whose signature is a scribble. Whoever sends out the letter must be identified, and their DIRECT phone number shown, and that number must not go to voice mail unless that person is dead.

6) If you are on a salary above $40,000, and if any of the above made you wince with discomfort, then get out of the service lark.

P.S. After posting this article, I sent a note to HSBC via an online form. I received a response within two hours. The sender provided her full name, street address, phone and fax numbers, and an email address, along with the links on how to fill in the forms, plus advice on what to do and how to do it, and which buttons to press and why. If HSBC can do it, why can’t other large organisations? It has nothing to do with technology. It’s all about soul and civility.

P.P.S. I called the lady from HSBC and she was delightful, happy, friendly, knowledgeable, and gave me great advice, send additional material within minutes, and offered to try a few ways to assist me, with a money back guarantee. Now, what could be fairer than that.

The caller from St George Bank (now part of Westpac) would not have known what hit him. I hung up in disgust and went online (logged in) and sent an email to the bank, expressing my concern. The next day I received a call from St George, and guess what the lady said? ‘Hello Mr Nader, I am calling about the email you sent to us last night in relation to the call you received. Before I can go any further, can you please provide me with your banking password.’

Drop me dead. What kind of brain-power do these people employ. Here I am, complaining that the banks must never call and ask for private information, and here she is, calling me to discuss the matter, asking me for my sacred password! Even if she knew me and I knew her, that is not the point. We cannot allow the public to believe that they should ever divulge that information to anyone over the phone. It is so risky. Identity theft is rife. How can St George Bank, and the Commonwealth Bank, and American Express do this?

Stupidity is too mild a word for this brainless procedure. Yet, St George Bank is rich and clever and large and complex and it employs nice people, some of whom are my friends. But the fact that the bank has a Board of Directors with all sorts of committees, along with a CEO and thousands of staff, makes me think: surely I cannot be the only one to be banging my head.

Perhaps we need a new word to describe unfathomable stupidity… how about Banking my head against a wall!

This very minute I was in the middle of preparing a presentation to be delivered next week called, ‘The dark side of the internet’. For years I have been screaming every-which-way, trying to get banks and institutions to understand about online fraud and identity theft. And so this very minute, I received a call on my mobile phone, showing an unlisted number, and the man said, ‘Is this Yonar?’ He means ‘Jonar’, but that’s ok. When someone gets any of my details wrong, I neither confirm nor deny, so I asked, ‘Who’s calling please?’ He told me that he is from the Commonwealth Bank. I could tell that he was leading up to asking me for my password, so I pre-empted his stupidity with a sigh and said in a low exhausted voice, ‘Don’t tell me you are going to ask me for the password.’ He then said, ‘Just one moment please,’ while he fiddled for ten seconds. And then he came back and said, ‘Yes what is your password?’

I told him that this was the most stupid question that any bank can ask over the phone. He called me out of the blue. He could have been anyone. I told him that I would never divulge that information over the phone to a stranger calling me, and he then said that I could call a 1300 number if I have concerns. I said, ‘No way. How do I know that the number you give me does not go to your mother or to your mate in Siberia?’ He then said, ‘You do not have to be so disrespectful’. So I replied, ‘Go away you silly person.’ Then I hung up.

The Commonwealth Bank has done other super silly things before (I shall blog those in due course). Some time ago, when the Comm Bank was stupid about another matter, I went online and sent a message to ask them for the name of their security manager, so that I could be a good citizen and a good client and assist them about a grave security problem of their own making. They never provided the name. I have tried to tell them. I mention it to everyone with whom I speak at the bank. Alas, they have no idea. Not a single clue. No brain cells in that department whatsoever.

Never, never, never, call a customer out of the blue and ask for a password. Identity theft is so problematic, that this practice is stupid and absurd and daft and crazy.

If the bank needed to speak with me, the man (or an automated computer) should have called and said, ‘Hello, I am calling from the Commonwealth Bank. If this is Mr Nader, can you please log into your online banking system and read a message that we have for you. Or please call our normal phone number and quote reference 12345′.

This solves the problem. Never never never never never never call anyone and ask them for their password. Hey stop: I have heard all the arguments before. My cry of never never never never never is supposed to protect us all because if we accept that this method of communications is acceptable, then we can be 100% certain that fraudsters will call poor unsuspecting customers who will naïvely hand out their password to strangers. How on earth can the Comm Bank expect any customer to respond to one of their staff calling and asking for a password?

Ok, let me make this clearer. Did you know that the password you have must never be shared with your spouse? If the bank ever finds out that you told your spouse the password, you will be penalised and unprotected if anyone hacks into your account. Let me try again: If anyone hacks into your account, you will be asked a series of questions, and if you are asked whether or not you have ever divulged your password (or written it down), and you admit to the bank that you had told your spouse (or anyone), then you void all protection that you might have been afforded. So, do you hear the alarm bells? If the terms and conditions forbid you from sharing your password with your spouse (or any living soul), how, in the name of all that is logical, does the bank expect that we answer a phone call, listen to a stranger who could be calling from anywhere, and just surrender the password just like that? What the bloody hell are they doing? It blows my mind. It is so beyond my comprehension that I just cannot believe that an organisation the size of the CBA can do this.

And one more thing: there are times when you might be speaking with your bank, when the staff member (or one of their colleagues) will need to call you back. I have had this happen before. They call and ask for the password, and I hit the roof again. Here is the solution to this problem: before you conclude the first call, the operator should say, ‘I, or one of my colleagues, will need to call you back. For this reason, we need a temporary password for this transaction. When we call you back, our password to you (so that you know who we are) will be “Mother Goose”. And in response, when we ask you for the temporary password, you will need to say, “Donald Duck” unless you wish to make up a temporary password of your own.’ (This is doubly important because the bank might call back when you are amongst friends and colleagues, and you do not want them to hear you uttering your regular password, because over time, people will begin to learn about the logic of your passwords, and they could hack into other programs of yours (because the bet is on that the style of password you use for one situation, is likely to be similar (if not identical) to how you craft passwords for other systems.)) I was once making a purchase at a department store. The sales person called my credit care issuer and asked for authorisation. The bank asked him to put me on the line. While on the phone, the bank asked me for my date of birth. How inconvenient and how risky. Also, I was surreounded by other customers and the sales person. How silly!

There you have it. In this single entry, I have given two solutions. It’s dead simple. I have no idea how large institutions, who are burdened by security breaches, can be so darn stupid!

P.S. Earlier I had said, ‘When someone gets any of my details wrong, I neither confirm nor deny’. Here is another example of this. A sherif knocked on my door at home (I am always in trouble) and he asked, ‘Is Miss Jonar Nader at home?’ There is no Miss Jonar anywhere. He was looking for Mr Jonar, being yours truly. However, being the super-duper-mega security conscious person that I am, I could neither confirm nor deny the existence of this Miss Jonar. I will never help a stranger to correct his data. It would be imprudent of me to add to his information. I was not trying to elude the law or to evade my duties, but we must never give a stranger one sliver of new information. He was perplexed because he kept asking me where she was, and I kept replying, ‘I can’t say’. For example, if someone calls you at home and asks, ‘Is this the Peters residence?’ You must never confirm nor deny. If they do not know who they are calling, you should be extra careful. If at this point you truly and really, and in all honesty, do not see anything wrong, and if you so much as slightly disagree with me on this point, I can say that you truly and really do not know how ID theft works and how hackers work. Each unsuspecting innocent friendly insignificant micro-bit of data is of great value. If you knew how to hack, your blood pressure would be very high at the moment. If you are a sweet lovely person with no concept of why I am enraged, then I fear for you.

P.P.S St George Bank suffers from the same stupidity, as noted here.