The IT Nerd

After running into issues with the GreenP Mobile Parking app and struggling to get them resolved, I was not exactly enthusiastic about using the app again. But yesterday I got a chance to do so as I visited a residential client in the northern end of Toronto. The client in question lives in a condo, but there’s four parking spaces of street level parking managed by GreenP. When I parked there, I noticed this:

Up until now, you could only use the GreenP app to pay for parking in one of their lots. But apparently you can now use it for on street parking, which I later found out that this new functionality was announced by GreenP that very day. So I decided to give it a shot. I had only expected to be there for 15 minutes to fix that Windows 10 update issue that takes computers offline. But in my line of work, the unexpected can often make an appearance, so I decided on an hour of parking. After entering the location number, I was able to pay for parking within 30 seconds. That was cool. What was even cooler is that when the unexpected did make an appearance in the form of a Windows 10 driver issue that kept the computer from booting, I was able to extend my parking time without having to run out to my vehicle to do so as the app warned me when I was about to run out of time, which gave me time to take action. That too was very cool.

One other thing that I noted was this:

They now allow you to refill your GreenP mobile account from PayPal. That will really appeal to a lot of people out there who don’t want to use their credit card for this sort of thing.

I have to admit that GreenP has the right idea here as they make it very easy for people to pay for parking and manage that. If they iron out the issues that I experienced recently, this app will be a winner. Let’s hope they do.

I have an update on my attempts to get $13.10 moved from one GreenP parking account to another. I got a phone call this morning from GreenP. As you recall when I initially called into them, I was dumped to a person’s voice mail. Keep in mind that this episode started on December 9th and today is December 14th. So that is a pretty long time to take to return a voice mail. Now, someone reading this will say that maybe they were out of the office or on vacation. That may be true, but their voice mail didn’t indicate that if that was the case. With customers who I consult on good customer service practices, I always recommend that you change your voice mail to indicate if you will be out of the office for an extended period of time, and whom one could go to to assist with whatever a customer could be calling about. That way a customer doesn’t feel like they have been forgotten about.

In any case, the person was nice enough to pull up my case and see what I was looking for. Then she said “Oh, that’s pretty straightforward. I’ll transfer those funds over in the next few minutes. I’ll send you an e-mail to follow up when I am done. Or you can check your GreenP app to see if the funds are there.”

About five minutes after I hung up from this call, I got an e-mail on my personal e-mail account that my old account had been closed. That prompted me to check the GreenP app on my phone where I saw this:

Within a minute, I got a e-mail saying that my new account had been adjusted with the dollar value above. A couple of minutes after that, I got an e-mail informing me that the funds had been transferred. It also said this:

Once again, I apologize for the poor customer service you received when you first called in.

As a token of our appreciation to you as a valued customer, we would like to offer you a one-time use coupon for up to $4.00 off your next active Mobile Parking session.

I’ll give them points for trying to make up for this. Not all companies do that as they believe solving the problem is enough. By doing this it also may make me more likely to use the app in the future. More on that in a second. I didn’t bring up the fact that I had a negative experience when this person phoned me back. So she either sensed my frustration in my voice mail, or someone at GreenP read my original post on this. Only they know which.

So….. At this point I have accomplished my goal move funds from one account to another. Though I have to wonder why this wasn’t done sooner and with less effort? Hopefully GreenP adjusts their processes to account for this use case so that others in this situation can get it addressed far easier and faster than I did. As for if I will continue to use the app. Well, the $4 electronic coupon is an incentive to use it for a little while longer. Then we’ll see if this app stays on my phone. And part of that will be influenced by any future interactions that I have with GreenP’s customer service team as customer service influences whether a customer stays with a product or dumps it.

A few months ago, I wrote about GreenP and their new app that allows you to pay for your parking by phone in the City Of Toronto. At the time I thought it was a cool idea, and to some degree for the following reasons:

• It would allow me to not have to carry around change to pay for parking at the parking meter or in a healthy number of GreenP lots.
• It would allow me to have better tracking of my parking habits if I needed to bill my customers for parking.
• I can extend my parking time by the push of a button if required.

But a recent experience with GreenP has really dissuaded me from ever using this app again. Here’s why. For a variety of reasons that I will not bore you with, I had to change my my mobile phone number. The problem with that is that the GreenP app is tied to the mobile phone number and not to the person. And according to the FAQ on the GreenP website, you need access to the phone to close the account and get your money refunded as per this:

That’s a problem in my use case as I no longer have access to the phone number in question because to validate you, the system sends a text or calls the phone number associated with the account. If I had known that, I would have taken care to do that before changing my mobile number. But I didn’t, so I looked around the FAQ and found this:

Okay. I am not in that specific situation. But I figured that someone at that number could help me.

Boy was I wrong about that.

I dialed in, and after listening to the options available to me, I chose the option “for all other inquiries” as my issue didn’t fit any of the other options, and got in touch with a woman who when I told her my situation, she recognized that this was a problem and her course of action was to send me to technical support. I can see why she would do that, but when I got there, they said that they are just the application vendor. Account issues are dealt with by GreenP. Plus they could not understand why I would be sent to them for this situation. So they transferred me back to GreenP, except that they transferred me straight to the voice mail of a GreenP employee. While I did leave a message, I was less than impressed by that.

So I decided to try another avenue. E-mail. I e-mailed mobilepay@greenp.com with an e-mail that explained my situation. I got a message delivery failure in response. In fact, I tried doing that from both the domains that I own as well as from a personal Hotmail account with the same result. That caused my impression of GreenP to nose dive.

Next I resorted to Twitter:

Hey @GreenPParking , If one no longer has access to their phone and the number associated with it, how can they close their GreenP account?

— The IT Nerd (@The_IT_Nerd) December 9, 2016

As I type this story, I have not had a response. But out of interest, I scrolled through the responses that this Twitter account sends out. A fair amount responses tell people who Tweet to them to call into the call center. That’s a #fail as GreenP has the opportunity to help a customer right then and there. If you want an example of this, take a look at the @RogersHelps Twitter account as they do a good job of helping customers via Twitter. But GreenP for whatever reason decides not to leverage this to help. Thus I figured that this was not going to be of help to me.

So at this point I am pretty frustrated. But I figured that I would give them another chance. So I tried dialing in again and chose the option “for all other inquiries.” After waiting for 10 minutes, I got someone who after explaining my situation to them wanted me to go back to technical support. I then explained what happened the last time I went there. So after asking me what my old and new phone numbers were and pulling up my account she put me on hold  Then she came back and created a case for me and gave me a case number (Hint: Always get a case number when you deal with a customer service origination) and offered to send me an e-mail with the details. Her plan was to reach out to the person who handles credit cards and haven them credit the amount that was on the account associated with my old phone back to my card. All $13.10 worth.

About 30 minutes later, this e-mail showed up in my personal e-mail account (click to enlarge):

We’ll see if this happens in the 10 days that are promised. Watch this space for an update.

I have to admit that this whole process is needlessly complicated and frustrating. Largely due to the fact that this is clearly a use case that GreenP never considered. Thus GreenP really needs to look at this use case to see if they can do something like this more efficiently from a customer service perspective. Or better yet, give users a self serve option to handle this use case. On top of that, they may want to revisit the wisdom of tying user accounts to the mobile phone numbers of users. Given this experience, perhaps it is not a good idea to use that as a means to identify account holders.

In the meantime, I’ll go old school so to speak and make sure I have plenty of change on hand if I want to park at a GreenP lot. That’s a shame because using a phone to pay for parking is a great idea, but it’s clearly not ready for prime time just yet.

UPDATE 12/12/2016: As of yet, I have yet to see the $13.10 pop up in my account. But I did get this over Twitter:

Please contact 416-393-7377 / mobilepay@greenp.com. Thanks!

— Green P Parking (@GreenPParking) December 12, 2016

This is the response that I expected. #Fail.

UPDATE 12/14/2016: This issue is now resolved. Click here to see what happened.