Computer Says No
We bank(ed) with First Republic and so now the Chase team is all over us with notices of account transfers, mortgage transfers, and the litany of other transfers and password changes that must go with new ownership. They promise to make it seamless. It never is. The portals, passwords, and persistent march of progress toward the customer service abyss carries on.
On a business trip last week, three items reared in 24 or so hours that made my head spin. I texted my sister about it, and she just about broke out in hives. Sent a note to the board letting them know why I went radio silent after our meeting and it is because we were buried in administrative headaches that my colleague said was what happens when the ‘computer says no.’ Ack!
Within a span of a day:
- Our head of finance is locked out of our legal portal when he went to upload our board meeting agenda and notes. A flurry of emails later and our corporate counsel (who we love by the way — amazing international firm — and who can say that about their law firm?!) let us know their IT department changed portals and forgot to tell us (or any other clients apparently) that they’d opted into a new system. Hmmm. Lo and behold we receive new instructions and the system in use is Thomson Reuters HighQ. I would like to say LowQ or NoQ because the log in process and double authentication instructions came in the form of a 3-page pdf. 3 pages of instructions? I about died.
- That very same day the same head of finance is locked out of our Barclay’s UK account. With the WORST customer service on the planet, it has been a series of calls, emails, trips to notaries, and now being stuck in KYC department purgatory to get our account unfrozen and our assets freed. Barclay’s it seems didn’t have the right phone number on file and decided that after 20+ years and payments that get made twice a month including recently (like clockwork) we were a bogus account. I don’t know a bank in the world that just decides to close long-standing accounts without telling the holder; they said they couldn’t reach us. We challenged that given their so-called Relationship Management Team assigned to us — Relationship anyone? Just this morning the KYC team told us to call the Relationship Team. That Team said their system had an outage and we should call the KYC team. And hours and hours and dozens of phone calls like this (crazy makers all of them and all expensive international calls I might add) and once again the computer still says no. The people toss up their hands, apologize, and blame the machine. Call back in two hours and the outage might be over. This has gone on a week!
- And the next day we opened the mail to see the IRS has decided, out of the clear blue sky since being founded in 1994 to audit Outsell 2021 and began burying our finance department in paperwork requests. Going digital during COVID is making the compliance process arduous. Thank god for great accounting firms.
Being an SMB is tough these days. I spent Monday afternoon with the CEO of a start-up and her partner the Co-founder of an amazing data aggregation business driven by AI — AMAZING solutions they’re both creating. We discussed the strategy and business model and hiring team of one; we chatted about the exit plans of the other. Now that was fun! I love life with clients, designing ground-breaking research for them; advising them; being a sounding board for them. But man, o man — when I return to the office to Thomson Reuters NoQ silliness and Barclay’s Alice in Wonderland dizzying experience I wonder what in the heck I’m doing. Can’t it just be fun? The computers say no.