Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 6)

I’m beginning to think that the recent “stress test” applied to U.S. financial institutions has stressed at least one of the institutions to the cracking point: Citibank.

How else can we explain the financial institution’s decision to intentionally hinder its customers from paying credit card bills?

Here’s the background: I use a corporate card provided by my employer for business-related expenses. It happens to be a Citibank Visa card.

When I received the corporate card some years ago, it included the URL of Citibank’s corporate customer service website. I typically access the site at work, and have the URL saved there in my browser favorites.

Today, on my mental health vacation day, MY stress level went up when I tried to pay my corporate card bill from home. I didn’t have the URL saved in my home browser favorites. “No problem,” I naively thought. “I’ll just get it off of the credit card.”

But I quickly realized that the current corporate card that I’m carrying has a customer service telephone number, but no website URL. “Weird, but I’ll just get it off of the Citibank statement,” I optimistically opined.

You guessed it: No website URL of any kind on the statement. Just line after tiny line of legal blather regarding what do if the credit card is lost, stolen, or embroiled in a billing dispute with a merchant. But if you want to actually pay Citibank on-time and conveniently through a website? Forget it!

Well, if you are a regular reader, you know that I didn’t forget it. I called the customer service telephone number, and after teasing the website URL from the friendly sounding phone representative, I asked the “elephant in the room” question as sweetly as I could.

“I was wondering…wouldn’t it be a good idea to print this URL on your credit card and statement so that customers like me could more easily pay our bill?”

“We don’t publish that information,” the representative replied in a tone that instantly turned from friendly to very guarded. “Why not?” I asked, not yet convinced that this was a problem…until she replied.

“That’s sensitive information,” the representative said, trying to sound shocked that I would even suggest such an absurd idea. “In fact, we can’t publish that information because the websites are going to be changing.”

“Umm…if you’re going to be changing the website addresses, how are customers like me going to be able to find the site to make payments?”

At that moment, the representative must have remembered that these calls can be monitored for training purposes, and she definitely was in need of training. “I wasn’t supposed to say that,” she said, quoting Hagrid from one of the Harry Potter novels. “Scratch that.”

Hmm…a financial institution that is struggling with unsecured debt from its credit card customers has made the decision to make it extremely difficult for those customers to make an online payment. Then, it apparently is embarking on a secret plan to change its online banking URLS without notifying its customers. And the response of its customer service representative is, “Scratch that”?

No Citibank. Scratch THIS!

When I and my fellow employees in Libertyville, Ill. heard yesterday that our Portland office was closing because of a (in our estimation) light dusting of snow and icy rain, we shook our heads. “Let them come to the Chicago area and see what winter is really all about,” I thought.

Then I saw this home video of icy collisions in Portland.

The saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” rings true in this case. After watching the video clip, no one at my office questioned the decision to close the Portland office!

I’m writing this quick post at home over the lunch hour before heading back to the office. Life has imitated art, as I live an approximation of an episode of “The Office,” one of my favorite television shows.

In last night’s episode, two of the key characters in the television show return from a secret joint-vacation to Jamaica. The man tries to send a suggestive photo of his female companion to a friend via email, but instead forwards it to half of his office. The other half of the office soon gets a copy of the photo via forwarded emails. The male character goes crazy, as his attempts to keep the matter private go horribly awry.

I laughed at the stupidity of that character, and how his mistake was broadcast throughout the office via email and then full-color poster-sized prints of the suggestive photo. “No one is THAT stupid in this day and age,” I thought to myself.

Then I got an email at work the next morning. No, it didn’t contain an attached suggestive photo. It contained a link to the website of the photographer who took pictures at our company’s recent holiday party. I went to the website, logged in with the supplied user name and password, and began to look at the pictures. “Nothing too bad,” I thought, when a coworker passed by and saw my computer screen. “Hey, don’t hog them to yourself,” my coworker complained, coaxing me into sending the link.

“No harm,” I thought. “We’re going to send the link to everyone later today anyway.” I forwarded the information and listened as my coworker began to review the pictures with other people who circled the cube. My biggest concern was whether a boss would pass by and wonder why this group of people didn’t have something better to do.

Then I saw the first questionable picture. While the first thumbnails I viewed were pretty sedate, they also were the first photos taken that night, before the drinking had gotten very far. I, and the group of employees in the nearby cube, began to see pictures where people threw caution to the wind, and (nearly) let it all hang out, so to speak. Nothing pornographic, but probably embarrassing in the calm (and sober) light of day, two weeks after the original event.

A supervisor who sits near me was one of the people who had taken several questionable photos with his date, and with some female coworkers. I called him over to my PC and showed him the photos. He reacted very much like the male character on “The Office” episode I had watched the previous evening. Lots of spontaneous sweat, increased respiration, and softly muttered sounds of terror.

Obviously, if he had thought about it at all, he imagined that only he would be able to view the photos. Now the reality that the entire company would realize just how far he can stretch out his tongue struck him. “Can we take those off of the site?” he whispered in a pleading voice.

I was a step ahead of him, but I knew that I had to move quickly. As word of the photos spread throughout the office, people began to log onto the site, using the login information that the photographer had given on the night of the party. With the okay of the service center management and HR, I had IT block access to the site. I exchanged emails with key people and together agreed that the site would remain blocked, and people would need to view and order photos from outside of the office. In the meantime, a coworker contacted the photographer to request that some of the more questionable photos be removed from the site.

Easy enough, but someone pointed out that some people in the photos might actually want to purchase those photos (maybe not the Tongue Master, but some of the others). How would they know that the photos were available if we had them removed from the website?

That is why I am at home. I had to leave the office where the photographer’s website was blocked by our IT Department, and get screen captures of the questionable photos before the photographer had a chance to remove them!

I hope that the people involved learned a lesson about corporate events like the holiday party. Careers aren’t often made there, but many a career has gone down in flames due, in part, to poor decisions made under the influence. That’s one of the reasons why I stuck to nonalcoholic beverages that evening–and struck a safe, non-offensive pose when taking a photograph with my wife.

The snow was falling briskly, and the television continued to announce traffic snarls, accidents, and a growing list of school and business closings. Anticipating the coming winter storm, my company’s HR Department had sent a broadcast email the day before to remind employees about the company’s emergency weather hotline number.

Would I get an unexpected day off of work? I dialed the number at 5:30 a.m. to check. The recorded message stated that the company was open for business as usual. But it gave no reference to today’s date (as in, “Today is Friday, Dec. 1 and this is the latest update.”) It sounded like the generic message that probably played every other day of the year.

I continued to get ready, and just before leaving the house (earlier than usual in anticipation of a long commute), I checked the message once again. Same message; same feeling of uncertainty about whether the business would be closed when I arrived.

With so many businesses and schools being closed, the roads were less traveled, and I actually arrived at work earlier than usual. The parking lot was mostly empty, and the lights were off in the main lobby and Security Desk. I drove to a side entrance where I could use my ID badge to enter, and was relieved to see a smattering of other employees already at work.

Coworkers grumbled about the drive into work, and wondered why we were open, when so many other companies were closed. Some shared my opinion that the hotline message should have clearly indicated that it was current. I spoke with a colleague in HR, who agreed, and changed the messsage.

While it made me feel good that my opinion as the communications expert was heard, I also know that a coworker had spoken to the same HR person hours earlier, with the same suggestion. When I told the coworker that I had spoken with HR and the message would be changed, his reaction was two-fold:

* It was too late, because most employees would have either fought their way into the office or turned back by then.
* It was frustrating that the common-sense opinion of a “common employee” didn’t seem to matter.

This storm, too, shall pass. With employee engagement getting a lot of attention within corporations, this kind of situation bears watching, however. One other suggestion that the company did act on was to buy lunch for everyone who made it into work. Also, most employees left early, while it was still light, after spending much of the day distracted by weather-related discussions.

All-in-all, questions as to the benefits of staying open when many other companies either delayed opening, or decided not to open at all that day.

I haven’t posted here in quite some time. The reason is that I’ve been pulled in too many directions, and something had to give. I have some time today, so I’m posting this quick note.

Life has been quite interesting lately, and I may provide some detail about my challenges at work related to enhancing communications. It’s been difficult to break away from the tactical because the strategic side is getting resistance from above.

As a one-person communication staff, I have to pick my battles, and my planning for how to win the social media battle is taking longer than I’d like. Recently, my request for launching a trial wiki was rebuffed by IT. I later learned that someone in IT got permission to set up a wiki for another internal project team. Frustrating!

I enjoy the fantasy world, but so far haven’t plunged into Second Life. Instead, my fantasy life revolves around two American football teams in separate fantasy football leagues. I manage my teams through websites offered by CBS Sportsline–a company that has just posted an example of how to address service issues.

The service problems were annoying, although not earth-shaking. At times when I couldn’t access the site, I simply waited until the site was available to me. No data was lost, and the outcome of my games was not impacted.

But I appreciate how seriously CBS Sportsline is taking this. In its online message, it goes into great detail about what has happened over the first eight weeks of the seasons, and promises to do better for the last half of the season. I wish that they had provided this information sooner, but at least they are coming clean.

Now I can only hope that the performance of my teams matches the effort of CBS Sportsline.

In a recent issue of the Ragan Report, communication consultant Steve Crescenzo asks a valid question about podcasts: Who has time to listen to podcasts on a regular basis?

With short podcasts running 10-15 minutes, and some shows running over an hour, you have to be dedicated to keep up. I recently put my ..MP3 player aside for a week, because I was stressing too much about the podcasts that I wasn’t hearing because of other life commitments. It did feel good to take a break, but I’ve started downloading my favorite podcasts again. I guess that I’m hooked.

Steve wondered what percentage of company employees would make time to listen to their CEO’s podcast–especially if it wasn’t “wildly funny, wickedly entertaining or highly controversial.” I know people who would. They are the same people who watch company videos, or listen to the quarterly all-employee meeting on CD or tape. When I worked at Fort James Corporation, we offered cassette tapes to employees who missed the quarterly meetings. Although the numbers weren’t large, it typically was people who didn’t want to be “out of the loop.” Every company has people like this.

A podcast is the latest way to distribute audio information and commentary. People who want to listen to it, will find time. The digital format and help such as show notes with time codes actually make it more convenient for the listener to select the information that is most appealing.

Personally, I find the process of downloading podcasts to my MP3 player a little cumbersome and time-consuming. That’s because I don’t have an iPod, I guess. I use Feedburner to download the podcasts to my PC, then I import them into the software that allows me to copy the podcasts to my MP3 player (a Sony Walkman Bean). But I have to convert every podcast file to an audio format (speed) that my player supports. Otherwise, the podcasts play too quickly, and the podcasters sound like the Chipmunks.

In mid-August of 2001, I was let go from my marketing communications position at a Chicago-area company—a “victim” of the slowing economy that had severely impacted the company’s revenues. I quickly talked with other members of my church, who also were looking for work, and we formed a job-seeker support group.

The group met on Tuesdays at a coffeehouse, where news and music softly played in the background. Our second meeting was on Sept. 11, 2001. I remember feeling annoyed that one member of the group interupted our discussion when he heard that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center Towers in New York. I dismissed the news as the accidental death of a poorly trained Cessna pilot.

I said something like, “Yeah, that’s sad…but we have to find jobs.” I wondered then how my fellow job-seeker could seem so taken back by the news of a single death in a city far away? Didn’t he worry, like I did, about paying the mortgage, feeding his family, and getting his self-esteem recharged?

As you know, the two planes that struck the World Trade Center that morning represented something far more sinister than I knew then. I returned home and spent the rest of that day in shocked horror, watching replay after replay of the collapse of the two towers, and the deaths of so many innocent people. It made my comment about needing a job seem so shallow and selfish.

The communicator in me tried to absorb the rapid-fire messages that came from the government, the media, and people I knew in the military and civilian realms. The Christian in me grieved for the terrorists who committed this horrible act, but cheered the sudden surge in interest around the nation in spirituality and faith. The spouse and father in me tried to stay positive as an already weakened economy went into sudden suspended animation. The slow job market nearly ground to a halt.

Looking back, five years later, I see that in the United States of America, people’s expectations remain high, our tolerance for pain is low, and our ability to be “Monday morning quarterbacks” is keen. Yet our memories of what truly is important seems so maddingly short.

Today, thank God, we remember.