Wachovia Corners Market on Crappy Online Bill Pay System

Do any REAL programmers work in the Wachovia Online Bill Pay department? I meaning, LIVE, honest to goodness folks with an eye to how things SHOULD work for a customer? Hmmm…. let me guess: they just laid off the GUI design guy, the ONLY PERSON employed by the bank who actually USES the online service and thus, might understand the basics of how Jane Doe wants to be able to pay her usurious shopping bill. Well, for those of you who have missed how lame, crappy, weak, and downright frustrating Wachovia’s online bill payment system is, let me be the sad messenger to flick it to your mentox (mental Inbox).

The Premise: you’re a NORMAL human being (translated: you don’t work in Information Technology, and have run from any course beginning with a star ( * ) character or ending in “ *IS ” which is all shorthand for “everything IS, be it MIS or CIS, or MORE/WORSE acronyms as yet to be invented.” You, Jane Doe, found a husband, raised a couple kids, a pet rabbit following (too) closely by a pet snake, then a dog and two Siamese cats who hate (or H8, in web vernacular) each other. No worries. At the end of my work week, I can go online and do my banking in the time it takes a Publix Mac & Cheese bowl to defrost, overheat, then spew toxic orange waste clouds over half the block. I’m SET! I have this banking thing DOWN, baby!! Now watch me go to work … (so says the insipid Bank American online banking actors, anyway). Back to Wachovia, the current wrath of my ire. Let me boil it down for you, so there’ll be no time wasting of precious Customer Service Rep time as they furiously work to solve your problem within the allotted “blame or punishment” time scoring limit. Problem #1 – the GUI is kludgy beyond belief. Here is what you see what you enter the page where you are supposed to be (by the way, from only one selectable source, namely your personal credit card account which should provide funds to pay your Wachovia Visa – at least, that’s the setup I have. Now, the normal thought when entering this form is, how can I make today’s payment? The next logical customer wish is the be able to make the payment recurring for whatever the new balance is going to be, and pay NO MORE or NO LESS than that (admittedly future) amount). As you can see from the diagram, no such mechanism exists. Instead, as you are heading off to a four week “lets rejuvenate our lives, our selves, and our relationship with a trip to the Alaskan frontier” you run into a problem. For the time you will be gone, SOMEBODY will have to monitor your account, figure out what your NEW minimum payment is going to be, o back into this so-called “automatic” payment system, and then make a chance to the previous amount you are soon, within minutes, to enter incorrectly. INCORRECTLY BECAUSE, BANK PROGRAMMING FOOLS, the customer needs a VARIABLE or VARIABLE LANGUAGE for a drop list entry here instead of a box TELLING THE BANK EXPLICITLY how much you, Jane Doe and Family, will pay. So you got the problem now? It’s really simple, since you’re supposed to be using AJAX 2.0 and lots of real time data traversal across data sets in turn purloined from data bases in god only knows what server in India … but you know the data is out there somehow, and naturally you can fix it – if somebody gives you the authority and makes it your JOB today. We’ll assume that hasn’t happened yet.We’ll also assume that, when I go to activate the little Calendar widget, that the calendar will have relevant information FROM MY ACCOUNT ALREADY POPULATED INTO, ABOVE, OR BELOW THE STUPID WIDGET SO I KNOW WHAT TRNASACTIONS TRANSPIRED ON WHAT DAY AND TIME IN THE MONTH IN WHICH THEY OCCURRED.’; Obviously, we haven’t upgrade those Visual Basic 6 default “Calendar widgets” which came out of the box. Thus, we can’t really assign any dynamic data to the widget itself, making us look even more like they are overpaying us and should send our jobs to the Far East via eLance. Guys, what is UP!!?? with this crappy programming? Don’t you understand what the customer wants to do when they get here? Most folks want to put their minimum payment on automatic pilot – tell me where to make it happen that whatever my default charge is, it gets PAID automatically from the bank account AND without me having to go back and double check on it like a nervous hen stopped at the coop door! Oh, and get my email notifications RIGHT too, please – half the time I never receive them, the other half they get stuck in my SPAM filter. So this is what we go through, trying to use the Wachovia Online Bill Pay service. By the way, last gripe: Everybody else I have every KNOWN has a separate, dedicated Visa site where they will promote and market the hell out of the Visa program, but I don’t see one here – just a lame set of semi-secure pages overlaid on a minimal interface which isn’t useful at all to customers, even when they click Help. C’mooooon guys … YOU CAN DO BETTER!!! Light a fire up there and get some of these very simple requests moving so customers won’t DEFAULT on their balances via a string of late charges associated with payments which don’t cover the minimum. This is serious business – let’s bump it up stairs and get a fire under some VP’s ass until it gets done, okay???? NEXT UP: How American Express uses Bad Code to Help Late Fees Revenue Grow

Tags: bad, bad programming, bill pay, online, poor, poor programming, sorry GUI, Wachovia