Gordaen’s Blog

After three years, my credit card was hitting its expiration date. I received the new card in the mail, but kept putting off activating it. A lot of companies force you to talk to a person at some point so they can convince you of how great their *insert crappy service here* is. The slightly better companies just make you put in a bunch of numbers and go through the electronic process. I called USAA expecting the second option, because they tend to be better than other financial institutions. The call took 23 seconds, and that included listening to the nice message at the end! I didn’t have to push any buttons. They simply verified the number that I was calling from was the number on my account and it was done.

USAA is a non-profit company, so they don’t have the corporate greed of most other companies. That’s probably why they don’t really push services on their customers (though they do sometimes suggest services, they always accept “no” as an answer). What they may or may not realize is that these are the little things that really end up making a difference.

If this one time it had been a big pain to activate the card, I probably wouldn’t have done anything about it. But, over time, if the service had always been a hassle, I wouldn’t bother renewing the card next time. If you make the process to activate or cancel services as painless as possible, people stay happy and your company maintains a good reputation. On the opposite side of the spectrum, well, why waste the energy typing when I can simply say AOL.