No Dashes or Spaces - revisited

My No Dashes Or Spaces Hall of Shame has been mildly popular with visitors to my website, and most of the new entries are "more of the same".

But today I ran into a problem with Quicken 2003 that ended up being one of these problems, and it took a 20 minute phone call with tech support to figure it out. My online update to my First USA credit card account was failing, even though the same username/password worked fine on the website. The error message was numeric, with no obvious way to read more into it.

After speaking with the technician he asked "do you have any spaces or dashes in the account number?"

Bingo

Just for discussion's sake, let's say that they have a good reason to disallow dashes and spaces: why in the hell don't they have an error message that suggests "don't use spaces or dashes"? Not only has this been an ongoing irritation for a customer for a week, but it burned 20 minutes of technical support time on their end

This is expensive for them, and bad for their customers.

I wish I knew whether Quicken or First USA were responsible.

For shame.

Posted by Steve at February 06, 2004 02:13 PM | TrackBack