A good friend of mine has a Eddie Bauer credit card.
When appying for the card at a store, she was told she could pay the bill over the internet, using her own credit card. As my friend lives in Canada, and the store was in the US, she asked if this would work from Canada. No problem the clerk at the store replied.
Turned out the clerk was wrong. When trying to register online to make a payment my friend was met with a requirement to supply both a US Social Security Number and a zip code. As the fields were required, my friend gave up, and said she probably would never use her Eddie Bauer card again.
Many companies make the same mistake. First they make it easy for the customer to shop (and even get a discount), a good customer experience, then they loose most of the goodwill through not living up to their promises. In this case, while it works for those who lives in the US, Eddie Bauer has effectively shut out those in Canada from the same service level.
Maybe they did not intend to? As for many other companies, the Eddie Bauer credit card accounts are not owned and operated by the company itself. For Eddie Bauer, the operator is the World Financial Network National Bank (WFNNB). It’s at their site the required fields can be found. In any case, the end result is that my friend so far has been unable to pay the way whe ws promised, and that impacts her Eddie Bauer experience.
Customer Experience Management looks at all parts of an organization and how they interact and impact the customer. In this case Eddie Bauer - and their credit card supplier - allowed for Canadien customers, but forgot to make it easy for them to pay their bills.
My friend is hoping that she will be able to pay by credit card when she calls the credit card company’s toll free number. We’ll see how it goes.
By the way, can you really make money as a credit card company when you first carry the purchases interest free and then let someone pay for it with a credit card?
Even though this credit card company failed in making it a great customer experience, they do care about their customers. When looking at the payment company’s site, it was interesting to sit here in sunny Vancouver and see the message that came up. I know Texas is a long way from here, but we do not live in igloos and we’ve had no bad storms lately. See image below.
roar at roarweb dot com
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