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| What Were They Thinking? |
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November 2008
Greetings!
CREDIT CARD SOLICITATION - Murky call to action
My main credit card for personal use is one that pays
me airline miles. I use this card a lot. I get points for
every dollar I spend and sometimes I get double or
triple points by spending money with airline partners
like car rental places. I've had this card since 2004
and have redeemed the miles for flights several
times.So you can imagine my surprise when I received what seemed to be an acquisition letter for the very same product, from the bank that issues my card. It came complete with an application form and invitation to use the phone, web, or mail to "request my card". The letter copy emphasized how to accumulate and redeem points for free flights - something that I was pretty clear about since I'd been doing it for almost 5 years. It also stressed bonus miles I could earn - except that the fine print on the back clearly excluded current card holders. "Ah", you're thinking, "Database error. They didn't filter out current card holders." I would have thought so too if it were not for that nifty variable data box at the bottom of the letter that contained the summary of my airline miles points activity. There seemed to be a conscious decision to include current card holders in the promotion. Clearly, most of my points come from using the card and they certainly know that. I read through everything in the envelope to try and figure out exactly what action the bank was hoping I would take. I still couldn't figure it out and I'm a document geek! Imagine the confusion from an average card holder. . .
UTILITY BILL - Waste, waste, waste
I briefly signed up for internet and television services
from one of the large communication companies.
They had a no-obligation free trial offer, so I tried them
out. As it turns out, I think they are still working out the
bugs. We never could get all our computers to get
connected and couldn't use the network printer in the
office. So, I cancelled before the trial period was up
and went back to my cable company.Last month I received a multi-page bill with a balance due. I had to call and request an adjustment since I should have had a zero balance for my one month of free service. Don't even get me started on the complex process I had to endure or the crazy explanation about why there was a balance on my account in the first place! This week, I received another bill. This one does have a zero balance, which is good. Given all the trouble I went through on the phone I was relieved to see the zero balance. So I don't consider the delivery of the statement to be a waste. Now if I get another zero- balance statement next month, that's a different story. What disturbs me is that they printed 4 images, used up 2 sheets of statement paper, and inserted 4 bill stuffers advertising expanded television services into a 6 x 9 envelope. All this to a non-customer who cancelled their services back in August. I kid you not. Of the 44 vertical inches of space available on all the pages, there are only 9 inches that contained any print other than page headings or barcodes. There would have been even less space used, but they printed some disclaimer text in 12 point type and arranged it in a 3 inch wide column down the left side. It could have easily fit in a smaller area had they utilized the full width of the page. Actually, since none of the disclaimers labeled "Important Information" even applied me, it would have been better to have left it off altogether, or used the space for something relevant. I should point out that other than colored borders at the top and bottom, all the images seemed to have been applied at run time so there were no pre-printed boxes, logos or text anywhere. The print quality isn't too great, except for the line in bold that says "Previous Balance - Past Due, Please Pay Immediately . . . 0.00". You'd think they could suppress that line if the balance is zero. Of course, there may have been some operational reasons for creating the document in this manner. Perhaps there was some efficiency realized by making all the statements 2-pagers. But to the consumer who gets the bill, it just looks wasteful. This is an impression that businesses should be working to avoid. All in all, this statement looked pretty awful. I got the feeling that IT programmed the statement in such a way that they didn't need to bother with any fancy formatting or logic. The result was a dreadfully amateurish product. How ironic that it came from a company whose product is communication.
CREDIT CARD SOLICITATION - How hard can it be to de-dupe?
My wife received a credit card solicitation a few days
ago from one of the largest credit card issuers in the
country. Nothing wrong with that - except that she got
duplicates.She got two identical mailers, delivered on the same day. Same offer, same promotional code, same inserts, name and address spelled and formatted exactly the same. From the control numbers printed above her name it appears that these two records may have been within 8 rows of each other in the database. And these weren't cheap mailers either. They featured one of those fake plastic credit cards that were attached to each of the letters. One might wonder if the card issuer could lower annual fees or interest rates if they only sent one pre- approval letter per prospect. Now I know that duplicate recognition can be tricky. Misspelled names, missing initials or suffixes, nicknames, etc. can all present challenges. But in this case it seems clear that they didn't even try to purge exact duplicates. Maybe they were in a hurry.
Oh, that could never happen here!
We've recently added some content to our web site.
Drop by when you have a chance to listen to an
interview I did with Kevin Craine of Craine
Communications where we talked about industry
trends and other matters. Newsletter subscribers can
get directly to the podcast page by clicking
here. Sincerely,  Mike Porter
Print/Mail Consultants
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