Track Your Calls with Backpack

In Ramit Sethi’s personal finance book entitled I Will Teach You to Be Rich, he discusses the importance of keeping track of customer support call information. I’ve been doing this for years in a web-application called Backpack. Great idea, great tool.

The mere thought of tracking customer support call information might be considered anal-retentive to many. But, truth is, having that information available is incredibly powerful. When a customer rep tells you “we don’t have a record of you ever asking us to remove that late fee, and no, we can no longer remove it because it’s been 30 days since the charge was incurred,” being able to refer back to previous calls, dates, times, names of reps, is POWERFUL stuff. Don’t be surprised if they immediately back off and start playing nicely — that’s exactly what will happen.

Of course you could use pen and paper to record this information, but the great thing about Backpack is that it’s available any time, from any computer with internet access, anywhere in the world. Keeping track of more than just customer support call information is a great idea too (some of those I’ll be discussing in later posts).

My strategy for keeping track of customer support call information is to keep it all in one Backpack page. I’ve created a Backpack page named “Call Logs” and then created a note for every company whose support call information I want to track. Within the note, I use the following bit of marked-up text as a table header:

|*Date*|*Time*|*Name*|*ID*|*Comments*|

When creating a new entry in reference to a call, it might look something like this:

|2009.03.04|3:15pm|Mark|---|Asked for lower APR, declined|

And the whole note, after several entries, might look something like this:

|*Date*|*Time*|*Name*|*ID*|*Comments*|
|2008.07.23|4pm|Allison|123|Asked to remove late fee (I forgot to pay), they removed, offer one a year|
|2008.08.15|2pm|Steven|---|Noticed that late fee was never removed, reluctant to remove at first, but after discussing details of July 23rd call with Steven, he finally noticed the call in the system and happily removed the late fee, apologizing for the mistake|
|2009.03.04|3:15pm|Mark|---|Asked for lower APR, declined|

The end result looks much better:

Backpack is a great tool, and incredibly useful for staying organized and keeping track of all sorts of things. Try it out!