Using Software That Just Works (Or Not Using What Doesn’t)
December 15, 2010I canceled my Mint.com account just now.
Not because of the reason I’ve mentioned before about whether or not they were really protecting their customer data. No, this was simply because the software no longer worked for me.
Not that I’m someone with a variety of accounts in multiple institutions. Not at all. I’m probably the typical case: 4-7 accounts spread over 3-5 major institutions. I do think it should be noted that I’m not using an obscure bank or some other corner case. Right now just 1 account is still downloading data. I’ve tried looking around on their Get Satisfaction account, but to no avail.
Now, I don’t work Intuit and I have no idea what kind of environment that goes on there or what issues they have to deal with. I know that to integrate with thousands of different institutions with their own APIs and formats, or whether there are sites that have to just get scraped because there is nothing else available. I cannot imagine the engineering and architecture that goes into that.
This is where my note that I use major institutions comes in – what if Mint, instead of focusing on the thousands of different institutions they attempt to support, first made sure that they had an extremely high quality of customer experience for a few of the largest institutions? In this case, really nailing just the top institutions will give you millions of potential users with a high level of service.
At least I wouldn’t see so many yellow exclamation points. Then again, I can’t really complain about a free service…
