Alec Newcomb's Blog

I try to keep rants off my blog but Citibank made such an utter FAIL in their recent marketing that I had to write about it.

I have been a loyal Citibank customer for at least 16 years since my days at MTV. I’ve banked with them personally, professionally as a small business owner,  and used their credit card as my primary card for a good 20 years. In summary they were my default starting point for all thing financial, IRA’s, investing, loans, etc.

Last week one Debbie Gabor wrote me to say in the most confusing form letter way, pay us $20 a month or keep $15K in combined balances with us.

My issues:

1. You started charging me the $20 back in July with no explanation. Not as of November 10th.

2. Your opening is statement is a lie. You don’t value my business and your letter is anything but simple to read.

3. Your negative selling of, “new types of fees that many other banks are testing or have already introduced.” Is lame. Tell me why you are better not how you suck less.

4. Why confuse this important communication to a long time customer with we are also screwing you on our reward system, ThankYou points.

5. I have no idea what my “Client Manual” and “Marketplace Addendum” are so reading them won’t help.

6. Do I really want to publicly tweet @askCiti to talk about this? Really? No I want a real person in the US to talk to.

7. I’d leave more money in my account if your rates were not .01% (checking) and .05% (savings) that is effectively zero. I can do better at 59 other banks according to Google who offer all the same services and many won’t charge me $20 for you to lend out my money.

I understand the world changed and you need to make it up the fees to keep your stock price from sinking any lower.

Let me make some simple suggestions:

- A strong and simple call to action to call you. Get me on the phone. As your newly redesigned web site is horrific and I can’t find a thing.

- If you are going to send me form letters at least do better than just putting in my entire name. You know a lot about me. Like I use to have a IRA account with you that you would love to get back and here are three reasons why you are better than bank X.

- I know letters are expensive but the dot matrix letter you sent me looked like something out of the 1980′s. Your credit card guys send me flashy four color mail most weeks. If you are going to stick it to me. Make it look professional.

Dear Debbie Gabor here is my answer. I did some research on Google and found out  you were screwing me. I actually have lots of great options so I’m moving all my accounts from Citibank. I also signed up for a better new credit card that will be my primary card and I’ll probably close my credit account as well because your web site is just so hard to use.

PS. I’m going to tell everyone I know that uses Citibank because my guess is your taking advantage of them as well. They just need a nudge to go take a look and see they too can get 1% rates, for free, with 24 hour US operators who are nice.

I was an early Spotify listener as I simply paid the full boat $9.99 package. I’ve been using it about 50% of the time vs. my usual listening to last.fm on the Sonos.

The good:

- I love being able to hear an entire album of new music start to finish without buying the album. Then typically I find myself buying the tracks I want. I travel too much to not have music loaded on my ipad for those flights where you are stuck in a middle seat for 2 hours on the ramp at o’hare. Plus, it is important to support the artists I like.

- The ability to send music like email is fantastic. I need to use it more. I see a lot of possibilities with this over time.

- Browsing others playlists on facebook is nice but can also be scary to see what your co-workers are listen to.

The bad:

- Hard to manage music. It loads your playlists from iTunes but it does not really work. You need the ability to buy a track and add to iTunes playlist/library directly. Ie set one master library rather than having two.

- They don’t have all the music you want to hear.

- Their new music area can be shallow with the same set of albums coming up. I’m sure they will improve the music discovery. It needs to learn like Last.fm or itunes what you listen to and like. If they merged with turntable.fm and 8tracks I’d be in heaven.

In the end I would recommend Spotify. It remains to be seen if I’ll be paying for it in six months with Apple’s cloud service coming out or drop down to the free level and lose the ability to play Spotify on the Sonos.

Sriram had this wonderful quote come across my Twitter stream, “You’re not Steve Jobs and your organization is not Apple. And your well-thought out strategy is probably terrible.”

I could not agree more. We all fall in love with our ideas, especially if your in a power point filled offsite. I find this all even more amusing as I’m the Chief Strategy Officer at 125 person SaaS company. I think a better title is Chief Trouble Maker as my role is really to push us to execute on the new while driving more of what is already working. Drive little experiments and kill the failures. One of those little experiments four years ago provides 55% of our revenue today.

It will always be about execution. Not the fancy strategy deck some agency/consultancy/CSO put together. I find the hardest point is to get your team use to the fact that it is ok to skin their knees. Regularly. Weekly. We all stumble. Just do it faster. Do more of it. Do it more often so you get use to it. Get promoted for it. Nose to the grind stone, capacity to execute your roll on the team, and a little blatant disregard for what can’t be done will take you much farther. As von Moltke said, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Which does not mean don’t have a plan just be ready to adapt it to the reality on the ground and not the J curve someone analysts put on a chart.