I did a little technical support tonight for a major Canadian
bank. Unpaid. Unrequested, too, actually. Not unappreciated though.
We were browsing the World of Gold Rewards site to see what
"reward" my wife might want as a birthday present
from her father. (Yes, we have everything we need, so
she wanted my help choosing. :-) )
The pictures were not showing up on the rewards, just
empty boxes where they should have been.
I was using my daughter's computer, which runs Ubuntu, so
I popped down to my own Windows machine to compare, and
got the same results. Checking the source for the
page showed me lots of Javascript, plus some IMG elements
with their source URL pointing to https://www.fairlanezip.com,
whoever they are. Clicking on the links in Firefox's
source view showed me a security warning because of an
SSL certificate expiry three days ago. I guess
maybe these fairlanezip people aren't particularly
competent or something.
Anyway, that was the easy part. The hard part, of course,
was trying to tell CIBC about it. Their "Contact Us" page
has only a phone number (toll-free), so a simple email was
out of the question. At least their hours of operation
were generous -- until midnight.
To avoid a long story: I called the number, faced five menu
items with no suitable option, pressed a few random numbers
and the pound sign, got to someone who heard the word "web"
and passed me off to their "online banking" department...
who said they were only for personal banking, not VISA,
but they could transfer me back and would talk to someone
there first to smooth the way.
They did that for a few
minutes, then told me the best approach would be to just
call the number again and ask for a supervisor. Rather
remarkably, given that I was doing this as a favour,
I did call back, got a supervisor
with no hassle, and told him I'd seen a problem and knew what
was causing it. He was actually grateful, as they had had
reports of a problem but obviously no answer yet, and
took the information I had to pass on to their in-house
IT staff (who, presumably, are about as on-the-ball as
the fairlanezip people, which is to say not very since
they hadn't seen or fixed the problem after three days).
With any luck, they'll have it fixed shortly, maybe by tomorrow
morning.
The nice thing about this was that everyone I
spoke to was pleasant even while not necessarily being able to
help, and all who understood what I was trying to do for them
expressed their thanks. I'll stay a happy TD Canada Trust
customer, but it's nice to know a big bank, even when their
own size and possible dead-weight is working against them,
can have nice and polite people answering the phone.