Whatever...

We protect your data (by getting rid of it)

By Mike King

It seems like we’re always hearing about the huge pressures that increased regulatory compliance has placed on business, none more so than in the financial services sector.  The requirement to not only keep records, but also be able to retrieve information quickly and efficiently, have meant huge changes to IT systems and working practices. 

However, it would appear that these changes are not quite as far reaching as I thought…

Yesterday I received a bizarre letter from my bank’s ‘Personal Banking Customer Services Centre’ (call centre to you and me). The letter, addressed to both myself and my wife, said that the bank hadn’t acted upon ‘our correspondence dated October 2006’ because it had been ‘unable to verify your signature against our records’.

Now, for a start, as a long term customer of this bank (we’ve been with them for more than 15 years, both personally and through our business), there is no way on earth that our signatures shouldn’t match their records.

But worse of all, and the real crux of my problem, there hasn't been any correspondence from us to our bank in the last few months relating to our account.  None at all. 

So, I rang the call centre on the number quoted in the letter to find out what this is all about.  After the customary automated list of 17 irrelevant options, I eventually got through to a live person.   

Although she was very nice, she was unable to help in any way.  She confirmed that the letter related to our joint personal account and was issued in response to a supposed written request from us. However, she couldn't tell me what our correspondence related to nor when it was dated.  Apparently, my bank keeps no record of such correspondence.

Of course, having never written to them in the first place, we're concerned.  More so after discovering that our bank doesn’t keep any record of written correspondence, real or imaginary, that it receives from its customers.  Is this the Data Protection Act gone mad? Or an over-enthusiastic recycling policy perhaps?

But what about in cases of attempted fraud? Surely having an actual record of correspondence might be a good idea…

There can’t be many organisations that write to their customers to say they can’t comply with their written request, only to then admit that it’s unable to remember what that request was.  Maybe the reason why banks complain so much about over-regulation is because they’re already struggling to cope with what sounds like institutional senility.

Invasion of the ID snatchers

By Flora Haslam

Having just moved house and inherited an apparently endless supply of the former occupants' utility bills and bank statements (in among the deluge of offers for credit, insurance and the best curry in South London), I've started thinking more about the problems of ID theft. 

There's plenty of scare stories about people who've found - often too late - that their identities have been stolen and thousands of pounds of debt racked up - for example, in the UK, we're currently in the midst of National Identity Fraud Prevention Week, yet another initiative telling us we should all be shredding our bills and locking up our important documents.  And that's before we've even thought about what we need to do to protect our identities online (though I'm still amazed by the number of people who click on phishing emails to update bank details for organisations they've never even banked with).

But it’s not just consumers.  Tackling ID fraud, and simply managing identities, is also becoming a big problem in the business world.  A recent survey from the Institute of Directors revealed that ID theft cost UK businesses an estimated £50million last year alone and if companies fail to take action, this figure is set to increase to £700m by 2020.

Traditional processes for managing people and identities in the office environment are becoming obsolete as new platforms, systems, databases and applications are continually added.  Just remembering to delete ex-employees from the system and change passwords regularly can seem like a mammoth task.  With the growing number of web users in so many organisations, it has become increasingly difficult for IT staff to keep track of who should have access to what - and when. 

Just as with corporate email usage, organisations should have formal policies in place to ensure that both staff and the company as a whole are following best ID protection practice.  For example, documents are stored and disposed of appropriately, users only have access to the information they need, and everybody is following safe computing rules to minimise the risk of key-logging Trojans infiltrating the corporate network. 

The ingenuity displayed by data thieves means that identity management is never going to be easy - but the financial implications for companies that don't take it seriously can be huge, so it's vital that this issue is seriously addressed now. 

Poor online service is forcing me back onto the streets

By Tom Kirkham

A few months back, Kathryn gave us a cautionary tale about self-service on the web.   Well, according to Transversal, online customer service has hit a new low, with customers of telcos often waiting up to 52 hours just for a response to their emails.

Reading this made me recall a problem I encountered recently while shopping online.  Using the ‘search for your address’ function on a website, I typed in my post code and house number, only for the Highgate branch of 'PetSmile' to appear on the screen.  As I don't currently live in a pet shop, I made repeated attempts to re-enter the information - to no avail - before searching in vain for a manual input option.  The only method of contacting the company was a formulaic customer comment form… at which point I decided to head into town to buy the item in person instead. 

So why didn’t I complain? Well, because frankly, comment forms like these often seem designed purely to stop you from ever getting hold of an actual real-time customer service human being.  In the case of one hugely successful e-commerce website, I was once sent an email directing me to the online help page, which advised me to call a support line, which put me through five minutes of speech recognition software, before finally referring me to my original email!

The internet has by and large made shopping far more convenient, but it still suffers from the disadvantage that, unlike the high street, you don't receive the things you order straight away (or in my case, sometimes at all).  In order to give customers a compelling reason to wait that little bit longer, high quality customer service has to be top of the agenda. 

Yes, automated systems can improve many online procedures, but if you remove the human element entirely, you're taking a big risk - and according to E-Consultancy, 80 percent of UK consumers are less likely to return to a site after just one frustrating shopping experience.

The answer is flexibility - give customers more contact options, while still retaining the convenience.  For instance, Orbitz has just announced that it is trialling a live instant messaging facility for anyone experiencing problems booking online.  The majority of businesses recognise that technology can reduce overheads - but it must be used in a way that empowers both customers and service reps, rather than making one want to strangle the other by the time they eventually make contact.

Why Web 2.0 isn’t ‘Dot Com – The Sequel'

By Joe Banks

First it was Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation buying social networking site MySpace, and now it’s search behemoth Google stumping up £880m for video sharing phenomenon YouTube.  The message is clear – big business is taking Web 2.0 very seriously indeed.

In fact, some commentators have opined that these companies are jumping on the ‘new’ new media bandwagon with unseemly haste, pointing out that neither MySpace or YouTube are making a profit, and that there’s no obvious business model to generate revenues in the future.

So, is this just the latest internet bubble, destined to burst messily in a couple of years’ time with red faces on one side and jeers of ‘we told you so’ on the other?

Somehow, I don’t think so.  There may be no defined business model yet (though the growing power of online advertising shouldn’t be underestimated here), but traditional media companies have finally worked out which way the wind’s blowing – hours before the deal with Google was signed, Universal Music, Sony BMG and CBS all agreed to officially license content to YouTube, whereas only months before they were threatening legal action for copyright infringement.

Contrast this with what happened a few years ago to Napster (neutered to the point of irrelevance), and you can see that the online world – and crucially the way it is viewed by ‘old media’ – has changed significantly.  Whether they like it or not, old media has had the good sense not to kill Web 2.0 at birth, having recognised that sites such as YouTube are providing something popular that they aren’t.  Google has certainly recognised this, which must have been a particularly bitter pill for them to swallow when you consider the failure of Google’s own video search service.

The point is that, while Web 2.0 standard bearers such as YouTube and MySpace might be the ‘new thing’, they’re clearly no longer operating in an immature market.   The original dot com crash happened because it was an imaginary economy talked up by the nascent online industry itself, rather than being driven by users and consumers.  In other words, the demand was for the most part illusory.  This is not the case with Web 2.0 – just look how quickly these sites have gone overground, with numerous articles about them already in the tabloids, broadsheets and Sunday supplements. 

There might have been sharp intakes of breath in some quarters when they saw the price that Google had paid for YouTube – but with traditional media being forced to embrace new delivery mechanisms as viewing/listening habits continue to fragment, this might still turn out to be a comparative snip. 

(As a footnote to this story, here’s another perspective on the valuation of Web 2.0 companies…)

Virtual school or virtual insanity*?

By Claire Gibson

Following Tom’s last post on ‘Whatever…’, and the debate that generated, I felt the need to put my fifty pence-worth in re the issue of bullying and technology.

An enterprising couple have come up with the idea of a virtual school, where pupils log on at 9.00am and chat to their classmates in the ‘school hall’, before starting lessons at 9.30am and finishing at 2.00pm.  I’m not going to allude (not much anyway) to the strangeness of these hours and compare them to my own school days, or even pay much attention to the four-day week...  No, the really disturbing thing for me is the complete lack of social or emotional effort required from the pupils.

One of the school’s founders, Ms Jayran, states that the school could be an alternative for pupils who have been bullied and need their confidence rebuilding. 

Now, I don’t know many people who haven’t at some point in their lives had an experience of bullying, and I’m also not of the camp that suggests bullying is ‘just part of life’, and in fact some sort of character-building rite of passage...  However, what I absolutely do not believe in is removing a child from this sort of situation and ‘rebuilding his/her confidence’ by offering a sterile and isolated alternative such as this, which appears to be more of a hiding place than a practical solution to the difficulties he or she has faced. The article claims also that the proposed introduction of microphones and webcams was resisted, because the students prefer to work just via the anonymity of text. 

Surely all this does is provide a cotton wool bubble, in which children grow up in seclusion - protected from bullying, but also strangers to the stimulating, if sometimes anxious, experience of growing up in a school environment.  How about never knowing the security of being able to say something stupid in a group of mates and laugh at yourself, without assuming that you’re being ridiculed or ‘bullied’?  It may sound extreme, but it’s perfectly plausible if emotional interaction is allowed to drop by the wayside.  Personally, I find it incredibly sad.

As for Ms Jayran’s comment that the school ‘puts [the children] in charge’ - well frankly, that’s just scary.

*Claire would like to point out that this title in no way condones the music of Jamiroquai