Customer service can make or break a a business relationship. Offer good service, and I’ll stick with you. Do me wrong, and I’ll dump you like a bad stock.

I’ve been using Mint.com since December when K. expressed her love for it. It’s been a long time since I tried for a comprehensive view of my finances, and it’s been a fascinating learning experience.

Mint.com has a few tremendous features, chief among them its attractive and generally usable interface. When that interface fails though, it does so spectacularly, and getting help from their customer support team is a study is poor reading comprehension.

The Problem

The big interface issue causing me to consider deleting my account revolves around their “rules”. Mint.com tries to smartly categorize your various transactions, automatically converting a semi-cryptic credit card entry from “Lucky #757 000000000SAN JOSE” to “Lucky” and placing it in the “Grocery” category.

Extremely handy when it works.

Extremely frustrating when it doesn’t, and it often doesn’t. The problems start when Mint.com gives two distinct transactions the same “smart” name, for example, turning both “AMAZON DIGITAL SVCS 866-216-107″ and  ”AMAZON.COM AMZN.COM/BI” into simply “Amazon” and putting them into “Shopping”.

Well, I’d actually like to have the former renamed to “Amazon MP3 Store” and categorize it as “Music”. Mint.com lets me do that… kinda: I can rename their displayed name (”Amazon”) to anything I want.

Of course, since Mint.com considers both “AMAZON DIGITAL SVCS 866-216-107″ and ”AMAZON.COM AMZN.COM/BI” to be simply “Amazon”,changing the former also changes the latter! 

They’re basically offering me only the opportunity to rename their already modified names! I have no ability to use the original name as the basis of my edits!

Beyond lame.

Poor Reading Comprehension

This gets beyond annoying interface behavior and into the realm of poor customer service when I decided to write them and ask about this behavior.

I’m trying to understand how the “Rules” system works. For example, I have three transactions, all from Amazon. They’re listed in various ways on my credit card:

[Credit Card] calls this MUSIC DWNLDS
[Credit Card] calls this AMAZON DIGITAL SVCS
[Credit Card] calls this AMAZON.COM AMZN.COM/BI

The Rules system for all three say

“You have a rule that renames Amazon…”

But why is it called “Amazon” in your system, rather than “MUSIC DWNLDS”, as it’s reported on my credit card? The current system makes it impossible to correctly assign transactions to the most appropriate categories. For example, while “AMAZON.COM AMZN.COM/BI” might be “Shopping”, “MUSIC DWNLDS” should be “Music”.

Why aren’t I able to have rules based on what the entry is actually called, rather than an arbitrary name Mint has assigned it?

And where can I change those arbitrary names?

About a week or so later, they respond:

Dear Jason,   

Thank you for contacting Mint.com.

If you would like to edit your existing rules, please do the following:

1. Go to the transactions’ page.
2. Go to the “edit rules” link located above the transactions.
3. A box will appear with all of your rules. Please locate the rule that you want to edit or delete.

Hm. I don’t recall asking how to change my existing rules. The closest I came was asking how to change Mint.com’s arbitrary names.

I would have put this off as one bad rep, too busy with real problems to do more than read my last line incorrectly… except I’d received similar bad responses before. When I wrote:

My E*Trade account stopped working 3 days ago with a “wrong password”. Thing is, I haven’t changed my password, so it can’t be that….

Why is E*Trade suddenly not working and telling me my password is wrong?

They responded after a couple of weeks:

I believe that your issue with E*TRADE  has been resolved as it is already added to your Mint account. If you encounter another problem, please contact us again athttps://wwws.mint.com/contact.event#contact-form.

Um… I didn’t write saying I couldn’t add my E*Trade account! I said your system thinks the password it has is wrong!

I’m in a customer service position. I know how difficult it can be to satisfy a customer, especially if you don’t have enough information, or have no good answers. However, in these cases, it’s always best to probe for more data or admit to the lack of a solution. 

In the case of the rules problem, searching the forums reveals dozens, perhaps hundreds of similar complaints: it’s a well-known problem. If Mint.com had provided even a non-answer of “we’re aware of some of the weaknesses in the rules system and we’re working on improving its functionality” I’d completely understand and wait for eventual updates.

Instead I’m left frustrated by a non-answer that reads like it came from an automated response generator with poor pattern matching behavior.

Which might explain the bad rules functionality.

I am far from a stock market expert. Barely a dabbler. I understand how the market works from a intellectual perspective, and have some skin in the game. Despite that, I generally consider it a canonical example of the Greater Fool Theory. I understand that the market—over time—”always goes up” but the last few years have shown that even fundamentally sound companies (like Apple or Amazon) will fall simply because “investors” don’t believe they can sell their shares to someone else at a higher price than they bought them.

The market sometimes moves more for psychological reasons than fundamental ones, and people are operating under fear conditions.

Which brings me to my point:

On January 20, 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed on at 7,949.09. 

I’m predicting that will be the lowest we’ll see the market the rest of this year.

I have a terrible track record of stock picks, so take my prediction with a big himalayan pink salt brick. But I believe that the wave of optimism accompanying President Obama into office will buoy the markets, and that his fiscal and economic policies will further shore them up.

Now, I’m not predicting a return to the stratospheric heights of 2007; heck, even a return to 10,000, a number we first topped some ten years ago—and last saw in October 2008—would require a greater than 25% increase over the Inauguration Day close (although at least one person is).

Today we saw a 3.5% increase over yesterday’s close. Tomorrow we’ll probably see a 3.5% drop. But I’m now on the record: we’ve seen the bottom. It’s all upside now.

January 20. Inauguration Day. A new President of the United States of America.

Another election, another inauguration, another president. Every four years, the same old thing. 

January 20, 2009. Inauguration Day. A new President of the United States of America.

Another election, another inauguration, another president. But definitely not the same old thing.

I find it impossible to express the enormity of the moment for me. I awoke at 7am. I recorded three TV channels across two TiVos. I watched it live at work on a massive screen. I continued watching later events on my office computer. I came home and watched MSNBC’s continued coverage.  I instant messaged. I tweeted.I texted. I teared up. I called my mother.

Yeah, it’s kind of a big deal.

From my earliest exposure to now-President Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, to his appearance on NPR’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, I’ve always said that this man could be president, I just never expected him to actually become president. I didn’t think this country was ready to elect a black man, that my dream would remain just that.

Then, after a hard-fought primary, America chose him to be the nominee of the Democratic party. An historic night itself, surpassed mere months later by his actual election. And now, today, it’s official. For the first time in our history, a black man, with his black wife, and his black daughters, will be the face of this country.

This is monumental. Everything that he and his family do from now on will have an additional, dare-I-say, tint of history to it. There are lot of “firsts” to come in the next four years, and I welcome every one of them.

Welcome to the club, Mr. President.