My bank froze my ATM card today. Their scanners picked up unusual activity on it, so they froze it. I’ve been with this bank for decades, and have been quite happy with their service and with the people there. But decades of good will was nearly wiped out by a single ill-considered decision.

This was the second time they did this to me. The first time cost me an opportunity to buy some really good chess items for nickels on the dollar.

There’s a customer service lesson to be learned, here. Their aim was good. They were trying to protect me from thievery, an aim I am 100% in accordance with. But, in the final analysis, they relied on their technology, not their people. A simple call to me (I was home that day) would have alerted me to the potential problems, and I could have allayed their fears and not been inconvenienced at all. In fact, I would have appreciated their alertness on my behalf, and had my already-good feeling for this bank reinforced. It was, in short, an opportunity to increase their hold over my business.

By relying solely on the tech, and not taking that extra step to check with me first, however, they inconvenienced and embarrassed me, and along the way cost me real dollars. By making the assumption that the software was right, they nearly wiped out a hefty balance of good will they had spent decades accumulating.

Trust your customers, people. Talk to them. When you start making decisions for them, you end up shipping an email client that by default runs any script emailed to it from anywhere in the world. (Yes, that actually happened. It was a large US software company, as a matter of fact.) You can help your customers succeed (which in turn will help you succeed) but only if you talk to them.

And never take a decision that will hamper them, inconvenience them, embarrass them, without first talking to them about it.