It’s been less than six months since Walmart in our area flipped the switch for EMV credit cards, and so far I am unimpressed with how they’ve handled it:
[WM Cashier] “That’ll be $xx ma’am/sir, go ahead and swipe your card.”
[Customer does so]
[WM Cashier sees the ‘alert’ on terminal screen and franticly grabs laminated card from pocket]
[WM Cashier, reading robotically] “You have an ICC card, please insert your card into the terminal.”
[Customer] “What?”
[Frustrated WM cashier, repeats] “You have an ICC card, please insert your card into the terminal.” [And stares at customer as if willing them to comply]
[Customer] “What’s an ICC card?”
[Bewildered WM cashier looks on back of blank laminated card] “Ummmmmmm…”
[Both customer and WM cashier stare at each other.]
Been there? Seen this?
I have. I have been behind this conversation at least a dozen times now, including probably half of them involving cardholders from our institution, and another in Georgia. After watching the first one take close to five minutes because the cardholder kept pulling the card out, I started identifying myself and aiding [no pun intended] both parties through the transaction.
I give Walmart credit for moving forward with EMV and ‘trying’ to prepare for the ‘I have a what kind of card?’ question…but it definitely could have been done better. Makes me a bit concerned, considering how they’ve done so little to educate their staff and customers about EMV in their stores, what will happen with MCX and ConnectC. Granted they have a much larger stake in the adoption of the new payment platform, but what happens at the point of interaction with the customer?
We are a country that refuses to ask directions in a car, we use the owner’s manuals for our appliances for fire kindling, and we can’t figure out how to make our DVR stop blinking “12:00″…I had to update my old VCR joke since the millennials have no idea what a VCR is these days.
So should we really leave the education of EMV to happen organically via word of mouth?
The airlines don’t allow a pilot to fly a 747, if he has never piloted anything more than a Cessna. I certainly don’t want anyone to give me a seat on a plane that has never been tested. Paratroopers jump from a 5 foot platform a few hundred times, and learn to pack their own chutes before someone straps one on them and asks them to drop into an unknown landscape.
So why in the financial sector, especially those below $10B, do we do such an awful job of educating, training, and even beta testing with our clients before we send them down the technological runway?
Our industry has made this error over and over again, and now we will have the merchants to assist us with confusing our members and customers. We didn’t educate cardholders about pending transactions and the significance of signature debit versus PIN debit, and so we had cardholders thinking that a Visa or MC symbol indicated they could run up a ‘credit’ balance on their card when they ran out of money. Don’t believe me? Ask anyone that worked frontline customer service the past 15 years.
With deposit automation, too many institutions believed their customers would learn the ropes through trial and error. Thousands of jams, rejected checks, mutilated cash, and tens of thousands of dollars in ‘user error’ service calls proved that to be false. The BEST education program I have ever seen, both internally and externally, for deposit automation was successfully run by One Nevada Credit Union. Their program took nothing for granted, vested everyone in the company into its success, and made sure to have one to one engagement with their cardholders to ensure success.
The impact of Windows 7 being felt right now, which will most assuredly continue for those who deferred their migration till 2015, could have been drastically reduced. If we had just proactively gotten in front of our cardholders to explain what it meant, why we had to do it, and the impact it could have at the national ATM landscape BEFORE the national media frenzy scared them into sending hundreds of emails and calls to FI contact centers. It was at times as bad as the Target media shotgun of paranoia. I’m still answering the question in regards to our migration off of XP, “Is it safe?” Which always gives me a chill as I flashback to the movie ‘Marathon Man’.
Many in this country, in our industry, did not learn from the ADA crush in 2011/2012 and waited to the 13th hour to get on the conversion train for Windows 7, necessary hardware upgrades, and the related ATM manufacturers software changes.
EMV is going to be our third attempt to “get it right”. Have we learned from ADA and Windows? Have we figured out that the entirety of the company, and our customer base needs to know what’s happening, when it’s happening, and what we need from them to be a successful symbiotic organization? Will we finally get the public education, customer education piece right as a whole versus just a few bright shining examples in the pile of operational mediocrity which the last three years of systems upheaval exposed?
Love it or hate it, ApplePay is immersed in a tsunamia of advertising, education, webinars (upon webinars) and by the time it hits stride, everyone will know how it works. This is how ADA, DA, EMV, and all customer/cardholder impacting changes should be publicized.
How about we heed what VISA and MasterCard are telling us and educate the public, and our consumers to understand what an ICC card actually is, and why it is important to not remove that card. What’s EMV? Tokenization? Encryption? And my favorite, why we still had to reissue EMV enabled credit cards that were caught up in the Home Depot fiasco?
We can do it now or we can do it later. But I’d rather the pilot learn how to fly the plane before I get on board. And in case he does have a problem, I’d rather not have the first time I actually need to rely on my parachute be the first time I am trying to learn how to put one on….while reading the fold out card…with an oxygen mask dangling in my face.
Cruachan Consulting Services, LLC 