Today, my wife stopped by a station to fill up the truck… and it rejected her Shell card. She told me about it this evening, and I began to investigate.
My first thought was that I hadn’t received a “payment due” notice from Shell in a month or two. From a company constantly hounding its customers to switch to paperless billing, this seemed odd. A quick search through my email confirmed that I’d received nothing from them since January.
Next stop: logging in to the site. Right up front, they insist that I fill out new security questions. “Fine,” I think, but not for long. Soon I’m reaching new levels of irritation.
One of the questions is “What’s your ____’s middle name?” I provided the answer, an extremely common name shared by millions of people. The app promptly errors out, informing me that “Answers must be at least four characters long.” Are you kidding me? That’s the name! So I try a different question: “How old was your father when you were born?” Given that my dad (like most men) fathered his children long before he reached 1000, I assumed it would be okay to give the expected two-digit answer. Oh but no… error! I had to spell the number for it to be accepted. Who did the QA on this shit?
So I finally make it into the system proper, and find that I’m way overdue. Needless to say, this is not the kind of thing I want happening in a credit-tight economy. Despite having set up email alerts with them years ago, they hadn’t given me a heads-up of any kind.
Clicking around, I find the alert management section of the site… and discover that they no longer even know my email address. All alerts are turned off. WTF? Right there on the page next to a “paperless statements are awesome!” ad, they’re telling me that they don’t even remember how to contact me with vital account info!
But hold on… it gets better! ‘Cause I also have a Citgo card, and like Shell, Citgo outsources its online accounting to Citi. Guess what I discovered? The exact same thing happened to my Citgo account! All alerts turned off, my email address deleted.
At this point, I’m reminded that, years ago, I was a regular user of the Mycheckfree service. It collected all of my online bills into a central interface and made keeping up with everything a breeze. Until, that is, almost every bank-owned business pulled out of Mycheckfree, demanding that everyone use their individual, dedicated sites for account management. When things like this happen, I bitterly ponder how these companies (many of whom are directly implicated in our economy’s current decline) screwed up my customer experience to save themselves a few cents per transaction, only to screw me again and again years later.
Frakkin’ lovely.