It's so easy for bank marketing to take a wrong turn
26 March 2014
Jacob Jegher
Yesterday I came home to a strange voicemail from ING Direct Canada. I decided to phone back right away because I noted the following 3 things about the message:
- The toll free number provided was nowhere to be found on the bank's web site
- The message left was with regards to "my profile and information"
- The reference number left on the voicemail was my online banking user ID
- You can have great data, but it's useless if you don't master things like privacy and security
- Customers should always be directed to call back a primary telephone number that can be easily validated. Banks are so cautious about email communication with clients - they should be just as cautious with telephone communication
- Under no circumstances should a user ID ever be divulged. It's a key piece of an authenticated login. It of course takes a couple of other pieces to login but that's not the point - why give away any pieces of the puzzle? Furthermore, if a bank or customer were to suffer a breach, a fraudster could attempt to gain access to other account credentials by leaving a convincing voicemail containing a user ID (that obviously did not happen here).
Comments
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Thanks for your comments.
Dan - I haven't heard of anything like that either!
Jeffry - agreed. This may be worthy of complaint to bank's privacy office.
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Wha? Who leaves the user ID as a reference number?!? I've never even HEARD of anything like that. So weird.
You have a very valid point about divulging sensitive information on a voice mail recording. It may even be a violation of bank privacy regulations. What if you had 4 roommates? Or lived in a halfway house loaded w/ex-cons? So ING could be breaking the law… and you were only trying to help. A few big problems might prevent your suggestions from going anywhere or triggering any response/changes.
1. Sales reps and call center staff are not given incentives to solicit suggestions from customers, nor are they given incentives to route suggestions when customers offer them.
2. No one cares. It isn't their department.
3. People are lazy. Fixing problems takes work. If there's no button for "this-customer-has-a-good-idea-and-we-need-to-change-our-process," it's going to get ignored.
No incentive + no easy internal process = "I'm sorry sir... I understand..."
Incentive + easy internal process = "That's a good idea. I'll be sure to pass your suggestion on just as soon as we're off the phone."