I had outstanding balance with my Citibank credit card. Previously, I pay my credit card balances by sending in a cheque. A few months ago, I had taken the time to create an inbound funds transfer account with Citibank, so that I can do funds transfer from my other bank to Citibank.
So, I connected to Citibank's website, and did a funds transfer. To my dismay, after the transfer is done, there was no way I could view the fact that I had done a funds transfer. I looked around for a while, before calling 18002255225 and spoke to a Citibank representative. I expressed my dismay and displeasure at being unable to view my funds transfer, and the Citibank rep said something to the tune of, if you do not see an error message, the funds transfer is successful. What are we living in? This isn't the year 1990 when Tim-Berners Lee first created the concept of the Web. For God's sake, this is the year 2004!
So, I told the Citibank rep if she could transfer me to a person in charge of the Citibank web development, so that I could express my displeasure. The end result of expressing my displeasure, was to hope that Citibank could buckle up and implement the functionality in (oh, for such a big company), say, a month. Personally, if it were me, I'll have it done within a day or two.
The rep told me I could feedback via the web. What the heck? If I feedback via the web, the most I'm gonna get is a template reply saying that my feedback was received and would be processed, etc etc, and eventually, nothing will get done!
Around 2 years ago, I bought Richard Branson's Losing My Virginity : How I've Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way. The book describes UK's most famous entrepreneur, Richard Branson, the owner of the empire of the Virgin Group.
When he had to get advertisements for Student, Richard used a trick to get two companies to sign up. I think the two companies were Coca-Cola and Pepsi. He called one up, and said the other had already advertised in his magazine, so would they like to advertise also? And then he called the other company, and used the same trick. Both companies eventually advertised in his Student magazine.
So, what the hell? I'm going to send Citibank a feedback, and point them at this blog. Then I'll write a few other banks, and tell them the kind of service Citibank is offering. If those other banks were smart, they'll improve their own services. Citibank will then have to play catch up.
This is much like the tug-of-war played between Intel and AMD. AMD forsee that 64-bit computing will one day rule, and began building 64-bit CPUs many years ago. Intel, which licensed AMD's 64-bit instruction set a few years ago, recently announced 64-bit x86 chips. Now, Intel is playing catching up.
If the Citibank fellows are smart, they'll start improving the “Funds Transfer thingy” right now to include the ability to view funds transfer transactions. Otherwise, how am I going to know when I stupidly done two duplicate funds transfers?