Emma Brooks

Well, I was going to write a blog post about my recent obsession with Tumblr and how WordPress compares but honestly, finding out that someone may have hijacked your credit card kind of deflates the mood to write, you know?

So I took a taxi downtown this evening to go see my good friend, Jon Crowley, celebrate his birthday in style at #loserkaraoke. When it came time to pay the lovely taxi driver, my credit card was declined. Ruh roh, as my lovely Tumblr would say. Not good.

I stood on the street for about 10 minutes, on my phone. I have two Scotiabank numbers in my adress book. Apparently the first one has regular business hours (wha?) and the second one just gave me beeping noises (ummm. ok.). So I grab my suddenly suspicious (and, I might add, new) credit card and call the number on the back. And get stuck in an infinite loop of automated menus. Pressing a bunch of zeros doesn’t even help! Gaaaah.

Finally, in desperation, I grab my bank card and call the number on the back of that! Successfully navigating  the menu this time, I get put on hold… for 10 minutes.

Now, I am a rational person. And it just so happened I was in quite the relaxed mood tonight. But I cannot imagine what someone who is freaking out about the credit card being stolen would feel about that kind of experience. And hasn’t Scotiabank been touting they’ve won awards for their customer service? It’s not playing out well right now for them. I am not impressed.

So I give up, and go inside and enjoy myself for an hour or two. Sadly, and sorry Jon!, I could not stay too long. The first thing I do when I get home is check my balance online. Yep, something is definitely up.

So I call the last number again, and get put on hold for 5 minutes. I don’t really understand why it took so long at 11pm on a Thursday night for Scotiabank to answer. Must be understaffed. Finally! Someone answers. After answering all the questions correctly to identify myself and explaining the situation, I am told that yeah, there might be some suspicious activity and did Scotiabank call me to let me know they’ve possibly locked down my card? Of course not. Seriously, that would have been nice to know BEFORE I got in the cab, you know?

And the kicker? The Scotiabank system is currently updating and the CSR cannot access my information right now. I now get to wait 1/2 hour for her to call me back when the system is ready to deal with me.

This is ridiculous. Scotiabank, I’ve been a customer of yours for a very long time (you know, since birth and all). 24 years of loyalty. TWENTY-FOUR. And up until recently, I would never dare dream of switching to another bank. I like your brand. I like your ads. I like the people I’ve dealt with. Customer service has been pretty good, for the most part, in my experience. But this kind of thing is the kind of incident that makes me take a step back and assess things.

Things like how you still don’t have an iPhone app. That would be nice. Or how you excitedly just introduced text alerts to customers’ phones. Excuse me? Text alerts? Isn’t that so 2004? I’m being serious here. As someone who enjoys the new and exciting things the internet and mobile industry can bring me, your lack of investment in keeping your technology up-to-date is a huge red flag to me.

So please. Call me back. Fix this. And tell me you have something shiny and new for me to play with. Then I think we’ll be ok.