It seams like most people have a horror story they are willing to share about financial services of some sort. It could be a bank, a credit card company, or online services such as paypal. Beyond that, many more people have had bad experiences with their customer support. Which kind of makes you wonder what their end goal is. Seth Godin has been having some problems with paypal freezing his account for having a successful project.

If you do get to talk to an actual person, they are usually a gatekeeper with limited abilities beyond answering simple questions. Then you will often be transfered to another person who asks you the same questions and also has limited decision making powers.

With paypal for example if your account is frozen you will have to go through a large hassle in order to free it back up. The idea is they are doing it to stop scammers and conmen. Naturally with any data there is a balance somewhere between security and usability. Any company must make trade-offs between the two, but alienating customers as a result is never a good plan.

As Seth puts it

The question I’d be asking is, “Do people who go through process and manage to prove that they are not criminals end up doing more business with us as a result of the way we treated them?” If the answer is no, you’re probably doing it wrong.

If you would like to read more about his ideas on customer support lines as well as learn about his story, check out “Thanks for calling, please go away.“