Customer Service

Toward a hygienic credit card

Merlin — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:06:06 -0400

You’ve probably heard the advice to photocopy your wallet’s contents; in the event that you lose your wallet, this makes it easy to know what you need to cancel and replace. Smart.

I recently received a new credit card and had forgotten what a hassle it is to change the info across all my various online accounts. Here’s a few suggestions based on things I did this time around that should make it easier (or at least more interesting) the next time this happens.

Write it down now

Create an OmniOutliner (or text or Excel or Google Docs) document, and capture the name of every account, site, or other location where you needed to update your credit card information. Also, create a second column where you paste the exact URL for the page you had to visit to make your change. (I’m already up to about 15 of these).

I really wish I’d already done this one of the other times I’ve gone through this; feels like it’ll really be handy for the next time.

Related: consider also creating columns where you paste in URLs, email addresses, or phone numbers for each company’s customer service department – particularly in case you need to escalate your updating to a live human.

Get cheap

Feeling like trimming back your lifestyle? Try hanging back a day or two or ten, and just wait for vendors to contact you about your “invalid card.” It can be astounding how many accounts you have set to run or renew automatically, and, believe me, merchants will let you know when they can’t run your card for some reason. This gives you a nice opportunity to verify for yourself that you really want all that stuff people are running your card to buy. Hell, I’m feeling tempted to “lose” my card every six months, just for the personal audit it provides.

Obviously, you don’t want to get critical services accidentally cancelled, but, at least in my experience, merchants are accustomed to users with multiple cards that sometimes just stop working for non-nefarious (if sometimes seemingly incompetent) reasons. Still, use this one with care.

One card for online

I’m tempted by the idea of using one credit card just for online purchases. I’m not sure this buys me any particular protection over mixing usage, but I’m attracted to the idea of making it a little easier to track down where abuse might have occurred, and “life” versus “the internet” seems like a satisfying taxonomy to start with.

I suppose if you’re some kind of mogul, you could get really granular, although I’d stop at the point where you have, say, a dedicated “Thai food card,” or the like.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of “Be Prepared” ideas like The Sick Box and The Blackout Box, but what do you think?

The Question to You

What’s your best practice for safe and convenient credit card hygiene? If you’ve had to go through updating your accounts tomorrow, what would you do differently from the last time?

”Toward a hygienic credit card” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 11, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Break out of "phone jail" with GetHuman

Merlin — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 15:49:01 -0400

In yesterday’s post about putting customer service numbers onto your mobile phone, commenter Joe suggested checking out Paul English’s wonderful GetHuman, a website that diligently collects and updates the phone numbers (and key punches) necessary to get you straight through to a human being at 500 well-known companies.

I realize this site is ancient news to a lot of you, but I couldn’t believe I’d never featured it in its own post here; I’ve been loving and using the crap out of GH (and the preceding IVR) for years now. Consider the oversight rectiﬁed.

Paul also shares some smart tips for intrepid information seekers (Hint: that fast “0” mashing tip has worked great for me):

Interrupt. Press 0 (or 0# or #0 or 0* or *0) repeatedly, sometimes quickly. Unfortunately the same keystroke does not always work for each company. Many IVRs will connect to a human after a few “invalid entries”, although some IVRs will hangup. :-(

Talk. Say “get human” (or “agent” or “representative”) or raise your voice, or just mumble. :) The IVR might connect you to a human after one of these key or unknown phrases.

Just hold, pretending you have only an old rotary phone….

A propos of nothing

I seem to recall mathowie once telling me that if you repeatedly scream obscenities at a voice robot, you sometimes get straight through. I’m not sure if it actually ever works, but it just feels great to scream the f-word into a phone sometimes.

Also new to me: here’s a list of the 500 companies and their secret knocks that’s suitable for printing at teeny-tiny size and sticking into your notebook or backpack. Or – if you’re feeling particularly ambitious – one imagines it wouldn’t be too hard to convert the HTML table into a CSV ﬁle that could pretty easily be munged into an importable list. Just if you’re feeling ambitious.

Conﬁdential to Paul: If it’s not a programmatic nightmare for you, I suspect that exporting your list to a downloadable vCard (with the secret code in “Notes”) would make you a hero. Also? You need you a prominent PayPal link, my friend. :) Great work, and thanks.

Update 2007-10-06 17:27:12 PDT

cshneid and dansays have each done us the honor of mashing up a vCard version of the GetHuman 500. So now you can get all 500 numbers into Address Book (and onto your iPhone) with a nice, easy import. Worked great for me!

See post comments for more info. – mdm

Update 2007-10-07 07:06:26 PDT

Paul has added a tab-separated ﬁle and a vCard version of the gethuman database on his site. Whenever the database is updated, you can grab a new copy for your Address Book. Thanks for the fast response, Paul. more »

”Break out of "phone jail" with GetHuman” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 06, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Dansays: Put all your customer service numbers into Address Book

Merlin — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:26:27 -0400

This morning, like a lot of other people, I was locked out of using my PayPal debit card while the site (and apparently its glass-jawed transaction processing network) took a total dirtnap. So it goes. That’s only indirectly the point of this post (although I did kind of feel like opening a “Can of Cory” on The Pal).

Point is, my pal dansays left a great comment on my whiny Flickr post laying out why he’s put all the customer service numbers of products and sites he uses right into his Apple Address Book. Great advice that I’ll be taking this weekend:

The number syncs to my iPhone, so it’s handy when I need it.

I have a record of the number, should the website decide to, ahem, “streamline” their customer service department by removing all traces of their phone number from their website and forcing all communications through email. This happened to me just last week.

I have a central place to keep all notes related to customer service conversations. Whenever resolving disputes, I switch into hyper-documentation mode. Who I talked with, when I talked with them, and what they promised me.

Smart fella, that Dan. 1 and 2 may seem obvious, but 3 is super-clever. If you’ve ever had to throw down with a dopey company, you know the importance of the paper trail. I really like the idea of having that with me on my Mac and on my iPhone.

”Dansays: Put all your customer service numbers into Address Book” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 05, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"