I like things that make my life easier

I like things that make my life easier – especially stuff online. Hence, brands that give me things that make my life easier go up in my estimations.

And that’s exactly what Barlcays have done with their new online CRM portal. And so now I like them a lot more.

Barclays old online CRM space was clunky, looked horrible and was only really a place to go and pay off your credit card bill. Now they’ve given new customers tools to help them manage their spend.

Not only does the new space look great as well as being easy to navigate, they’ve been able to turn a horrible looking table of transactions into something more interesting:

my barclays card now helps you see how you have spent your money - I like it!

Barclaycard now automatically assigns transactions into categories and then displays these in a funky pie chart. So all my grocery shopping is automatically in one handy column. If you don’t like how it’s assigned things you can set up your own categories and put different payers into different places, which it will remember for the future.

You can also look at your spend over more than one month, so you can see in total how much you’ve spent on shoes in the last year (if your shoe spend is a worry to you).

So in summary: Barclaycard’s new CRM area is handy and it’s made me like them a lot more.

But the interesting thing is the impact it’s had on me in terms of being a bit of an advocate for Barclaycard. I told a lot more people about how good it is (and therefore how good Barclaycard are) than I would have done if this didn’t exist. If brands give people useful tools then they are more likely to get people to like them. And when people like you, they’re more than happy to help you out by telling their friends.