Corporate Cluelessness – part 3000

I’ve written about Fidelity before, as they are the repository of my kids’ 529 plans (through no fault of my own).

Now the thing that used to set me off was the convoluted phone system that required me to eventually hit “0” and speak to a representative every time I wanted to withdraw money (about 8 times a year, with two kids in college). So I’d go through this procedure and they would transfer the money to my linked checking account about two days later, so I could pay the bills.

About a month ago I get an e-mail telling me they now have on-line withdrawal capabilities. Yippee – no more convoluted phone system!

Naturally the first two times I try to enroll – it won’t let me, but third time’s the charm. I enroll both accounts and make my first withdrawal. Wait, what’s this? You’re going to mail me a check and I’ll get it in about six days?

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the on-line experience supposed to be easier and faster? The frustrating part is that they already have my checking account info – they’ve been transferring money to it for two years. All they had to do was add a “transfer to checking account on file ending in xxxx?”

So my choices are these: use the frustrating phone system and get the money in two days or use the not-so-frustrating on-line system and get it in six? Or just move the 529 plans to a less clueless institution – yeah, that might be the way to go.

A(nother) Sad Story

This is a true story – names have been changed to protect the innocent (and shield the guilty). There’s a very large, well respected company that has their reps use an internal Sales Force Automation System (SFA) we’ll call SalesSonar. This is a Siebel system, but I’m not gonna blame this on Siebel because I’m sure that, even though there may be some limitations in Siebel systems, most of the faults in this particular installation are self-imposed.

If you asked this company to define what the goals of this SFA system are, they’d say activity tracking, analyzing metrics and data integrity – the usual buzzwords. Let me tell you what they actually get.

Due to “data integrity” issues they’ve made it practically impossible for reps to change data already input, or to erase data. For example, there are three separate entries for one client, whom we’ll call ChoicePoint. There’s Choice Point, ChoicePoint LLC, and CHOICEPOINT. Now you’d think that, if you’ve ever Googled anything, in this situation you’d have been asked “Did you mean ChoicePoint LLC?”, so that you could choose something already entered. Can’t do that. Two of these entries have the same address, one has an old one. Each of the three has different listings of contacts, activities and opportunities. Can any of these things be changed by a user? They cannot. Suppose the firm moves – can one change the address? One cannot. How about if someone leaves one prospect and goes to another – can one move or copy all the previous activities so one can tell what the firm has already done? They cannot. Multiple entries, conflicting addresses and contacts and incomplete activity history. So much for data integrity.

And because the company has strange fears about security (this is a company that flaunts its client lists in its marketing material. Hello?) they refuse to web-enable the application, meaning that reps have to either be in the office or attached to the VPN to access it. And access it they must because the company bases part of a rep’s compensation on their use of the system, which is normally something I’d recommend.

However.

This compensation reduction is based on a rep having X number of “trackable activities” for the month, as reported as of the 10th of the following month. What this means in practice, because the system is practically unusable on an on-going basis, is that on the 9th of every month 90% of the sales force, hundreds of reps, sit in their offices all day inputting their monthly activities. That’s quite the loss of productivity, isn’t it? Considering that there’s ~ 20 work days a month, losing one day is the equivalent of reducing productivity by 5%. And these things are supposed to make us more productive, not less.

What’s more is that in terms of activity tracking, the company can only be sure of what it’s reps are doing, have done, that one day, the 10th. Since reps don’t use the system on an on-going basis, if the organization wants to know what everyone is doing this week (say) they can’t. The 10th of next month they can find out, but not today.

Now of course you’re thinking that this is an isolated example. Well this might be a slightly more egregious example than most, but there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of firms whose implementations of SFA have been so botched that any benefits that would normally be expected are non-existent.

And that is both a shame and a tremendous waste of time, money and talent.