Corporate America Listens?

I am pretty skeptical about most corporate decisions and believe they are generally made in the company's interest, not customers.   So I am less than sympathetic to corporate interests when faced with a choice between them and people.  A lot of companies spend a lot of time and energy these days collecting "surveys" from customers, but it's never clear that anything is actually done with most of it.  Many times you can tell from the way survey questions are presented that the company 1) wants certain responses, 2) isn't really interested in honest feedback, and 3) simply wants customers to feel like their opinions matter.   Some politicians have adopted the same practice to "find out" what voters want.   In reality, these surveys simply tell voters what the politician thinks is the "right way."


I recently was startled to discover a company actually listened to its customers and even reversed a decision the company had previously made.  And, to my knowledge, this wasn't a result of a poll, but of actual feedback received from customers.  


A month or so ago, I received a notification from Discover Card, informing me that they were discontinuing Discover's Secure On-line Account Numbers.   Owners of a Discover Card could log into the Discovercard.com website and generate a credit card number that could be used for a web purchase anywhere Discover cards could be used.   The advantage of this system is that the vendor never sees your real card number so there's no chance of your account being stolen or compromised and the generated account number can only be used once.   So a website that wants you to "sign up" for a recurring service (when all you want is to buy something one time) can't process subsequent purchases against the generated number; it just won't work.   


So for whatever reason, Discover decided to drop this program.   I had used it for almost all online purchasing the past couple of years, so I wasn't happy to receive this news.   I sent Discover an email in which I said that the On-line Account Numbers were the main reason I used the account at all, so I wouldn't be using my Discover Card much in the future.  I figured they'd get the email and hit the delete button.


I was wrong.   A few days ago, I received an email from Discover which announced that they had decided to reinstate the program:

We recently announced the decision to discontinue the Secure Online Account Number feature.
Since then, we've heard customers like you tell us how much they love the added control of usingSecure Online Account Numbers for their online purchases.
Based on the feedback we've decided to reinstate this feature. Beginning today you will once again be able to generate secure online account numbers for online purchases.
We appreciate your loyalty and your feedback. Thank you for using Discover card.

I have to admit I am stunned by the notion that a large financial corporation pays any attention to customer comments.  Even more surprising is that they actually reversed a publicly announced decision, apparently due to those customer comments.    Kudos to Discover Card's management.


At least one piece of corporate America listened.  Who woulda thunk?