How to Dissipate Goodwill

The CBC news portal has a story about how easily a major bank can spread the word of its bad attitude to its customers.

The owner of a “small immigration consulting firm” (I suspect a solo entrepreneur) was methodically poring over his bank statements when he noticed what he thought was an overcharge of $1.25.

Now your immediate reaction is “What’s to worry about $1.25, fer heaven’s sake?!!”, but those of us who work in the computing and/or financial sectors worry about an error that amounts to six sips of a cruddy takeaway coffee. Today the error is manifest as one dollar, but next time it might be one-thousand dollars. We are professional and owe it to our clients to clear out any detected errors in our machinery. Our clients are important to us.

Not so this major Canadian bank, which ultimately agrees to refund half a cup of coffee, but only if the business owner will sign a non-disclosure agreement.

I have signed NDAs in the past; they mainly focus on not revealing my client’s trade secrets, and that seems fair enough.

But why would a bank ask its customer not to reveal that they had addressed and solved his problem?

It seems to me that a major bank should be boasting about its attention to detail and its attention to customer satisfaction, even for a solo entrepreneur who is missing $1.25.

Perhaps they should reward the fellow for documenting a problem with the bank’s computer systems.

What are they worried about? That a thousand users will, tomorrow, all ask for $1.25?

That would come to $1,250.00 if I’ve done my sums correctly.

Had I to pay out $1,250 tomorrow my chequing account would be handicapped until the next pension day (that is fourteen days away as I type).

But what is $1,250 to a major Canadian bank? I did a very quick search and found a web page that suggests the bank made about a billion dollars each week in revenue. That works out to about $1,500 per second.

You can do the math to calculate what blink of an eyelid is $1.25.

In the meantime, you’ll be saying to yourself “Why should I open an account with a bank like that?”.

Search