My mother just received a cheery letter from Rick, her financial advisor for the last 14 years, telling her what a good job he has been doing and asking that she give him a high score on the company evaluation form that will be arriving in the mail shortly.

Time to turn to a Ouija Board, I guess, since the letter came about 11 months after her death. Just two weeks before the broken hip that led to her short hospitalization, Rick and his assistant came up from Green Bay for a relaxed afternoon of beer and bratwursts at our house. Clearly he knows she is gone, but the American Express computer system doesn’t.

Not for the first time I have wondered who, if anyone, at these financial services firms pays any attention to customer relations beyond the marketing campaigns.

For example, annually for at least the last couple of years, my mother received a letter from American Express informing her that if she had a type of account – identified by acronym but never spelled out, much less explained – and if she was over 70, she had to withdraw a certain amount each year under IRS requirements. It went something like that. Probably drafted by an attorney to meet a compliance requirement, it was pretty close to impossible for an average person to decipher. What it did make clear was that American Express couldn’t be bothered to link together its computer systems and determine whether this client – who had started as a client in Pennsylvania nearly 30 years ago when the company was still called IDS – was over 70 and had this type of account.

Speaking at TowerGroup’s conference a few weeks ago, Progressive Insurance’s Alan Bauer commented on the HOLD recordings that say “Your call is very important to us…” In Bauer’s view, not only are the companies lying to their customers, but they are acting as if the customers are too stupid to figure it out.

And that’s what happens when you leave compliance to lawyers. Your marketing may go on and on about your personalized service, but the letter clearly says that American Express can’t be bothered to figure out either the age or the holdings of its customers.

Progressive insists that its top executives buy their insurance through the company, the same way the public does. Bauer said he got a call from one of the senior people to complain a renewal hadn’t come through. That’s how the company found a glitch in its systems that had held up a small number of renewal letters.

Is anyone at your firm monitoring the customer experience all the way through? Do marketing folks review what compliance is doing? Who’s responsible for the messages you are sending to customers?

When I called the American Express 800 number listed on one form to get more information on the estate, this is what I heard.

“If you would like to notify us of a client’s death through our automated system, please press 1.” By contrast, at Vanguard I talked to a person who, once she learned I was calling about an estate, transferred me to a special group where I was treated very courteously on both the first and follow up calls.

The result of this experience? Perhaps I will transfer my own American Express account to Vanguard.

And I just might tell a few friends.