Be smart, be safe, Log Out

When you’ve finished managing your account at Discover.com we strongly encourage you to click the Log Out button. This signals our Web servers that you have completed your tasks and it can now properly close out your session. We have conveniently placed a nice, large, orange Log Out button on the top of each page of the secure site. No need to go hunting around for it.

A Log Out button can be found at the top of every page of the secure site

Logging out of a Web site is like clicking your key remote lock button after parking your car. When you hear that “chirp” or short horn burst—you experience extra peace of mind of knowing everything is locked down. When you Log Out of the Discover site we disable your browser’s Back button so if you are using a public computer (at a library for instance) no one can come along behind you and see your account details. Logging out is a good online safety habit to acquire even if you are accessing your account from your personal or work computer.

Just so you know, when you log in to Discover.com we start a timer. Each click on a link or page reload of the site resets the timer to zero. If you are not active on the site for a while and the timer runs out we automatically log you off the site. This is a normal security measure for your protection. So if you get distracted with something else and then get back to see the Logged Out screen on your computer, it’s just us watching your back.

Password Paralysis has a Cure! Introducing our online Click to Chat.

Click to Chat

I have way too many passwords to remember. Is the password for my credit card account the same as the one I use for my bank account or the one I use for my car loan?  Did I use the number 1 for the “i” in my user id here to make it more secure? Honestly–I don’t know. You probably have a similar problem any time you try to log in to Discover.com or any other Web site where you manage your money, pay bills or access personal information. I’ve even read some industry blogs that say the average Web site user manages as many as 80+ passwords. Yikes!

In this increasingly password centric Web world, wouldn’t it be great if somebody offered you some help with logging in? And wouldn’t it be nice if that help came without having to pick up the phone, wait on hold for 20 minutes only to find out the password you used for this Web site was in fact your car’s make & model (just like you thought it was) except that you used a “zero” instead of an “o” in “Subaru0utback”?

That’s why Discover.com provides online chat help when trying to log in to our Web site.  After trying to log-in three or more times, we offer you a chat to help you try to remember your user id and/or password. And if we just can’t seem to help you remember “Alabama” or “CrimsonT1de” or “MagicBus68” – our chat agents (yes, they are live people) will help you reset it so that you can change it back to something more memorable like “BondGirl007” or “Sk1BumsRule”.

We’ve received so much great feedback from our customers on their interactive experience through our online chat that we’re looking at expanding the places where we offer it. We’d love to hear your feedback about the places that you’d like to see our online chat. Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.

My college son is an authorized user on my Discover card. What, me worry?

My son is a college student of semi-independent means. He’s an authorized user on my Discover card with the understanding that he can use my card for emergencies only. And not the “I need a pizza” kind of emergencies, either.

Because I work at Discover and use my Discover card quite a bit, I’ve found out some things that the average Jo may not know about Discover resources. For instance:

1. You can get cash over your purchases at places like Sam’s Club^® and local grocery stores. Click here to see where you can get an extra $40 or so when you need it. My son is an authorized user and this cash over feature has helped him out quite a few times.

There’s no transaction fees, ATM fees or bank fees for cash over, either. (My bank charges me something called an “external transfer fee” and it would take days to transfer some cash.)

2. Speaking of bailing out, my son went to Central America for a trip—and ran out of cash!!! I found out where he could use my/our Discover card in Costa Rica (click here for International Usage FAQs).

I also found out that hotels don’t always display credit card decals—so you should ask if they accept Discover card. I learned that in some places you can take your ID and your Discover card and get cash at a bank. For other cash access ideas click here.

3. When you use your Discover card, it comes with some travel benefits you may not know about. Check here to see all the ways your card can come to the rescue when you’re traveling away from home. Your travel benefits include emergency cash transfer, lost baggage help, flight rebooking, passport replacement—even things like help with emergency medical and prescription eyeglass replacement.

I feel better knowing the next time my son is on some trip, even if I can’t be there, I’ve got him covered.

What? Me forget your birthday? (Why I love eCertificates!)

My Instant eCertificate

My Cashback Bonus^® has saved my bacon more than a few times.

I live in a different town than the rest of my family, so I’m not able to be with them when something happens. When my sister Betsy went through chemo, I sent her flowers every time she had a treatment.

I’d redeem a $20 Cashback Bonus for a $40 eCertificate, go online to FTD to see what they had in my price range and call in my order using my eCertificate number. It took maybe five minutes. My sister would come home and there would be a bright bouquet waiting for her.

When my niece Sally and her three small boys (all under the age of 6!!!) came down with a nasty flu, I redeemed my Cashback Bonus for an eCertificate and sent them a Mrs. Beasley muffin and cookie gift basket via FTD. They LOVED it.

My nephew Pete broke his foot playing soccer—I used my Cashback Bonus for crate of Mrs. Field’s Toffee Nut popcorn which, because he refused to share with anyone else, lasted until he was off crutches.

Hey, I’m thoughtful that way. I’m a “what can I do in 5 minutes” kind of thoughtful.

I can get a heads-up of a family event, cash in an eCertificate and fire off a gift in record time.

With eCertificates you redeem your rewards electronically and can send something out almost instantly.

Which is handy when, for instance, you’ve completely forgotten your dad’s birthday. You can

1. redeem $20 Cashback Bonus for a $30 Omaha Steak eCertificate
2. go online and find a special deal, and
3. express-ship some bacon-wrapped fillets to dad in time for his birthday.

A very phishy e-mail: Tips to stop phishing—and keep your e-mail secure

“Phishing” example from Phishtank.com FAQs

I bought a new car last month. So it wasn’t surprising to get an e-mail from my car company offering congratulations.

But a few things seemed suspicious about this e-mail. One, I’d gotten other legitimate e-mails from this car company, none of which had ended up in my spam folder. And two, this e-mail wanted some personal information. Once I looked a little closer I also noticed that the “from” address was different than the other e-mails from the car company.

A quick Google-search came up with 8 pages of warnings from Fraudwatcher.org, 419scam.org and other sites alerting me to this attempt at phishing.

Phishing is an attempt to steal information about your identity—including your birth date, SS#, address, PIN, password and user IDs, and financial information. Phishing e-mails may look a lot like they come from a legitimate or trusted source. Often these e-mails are looking to get personal data by asking you to call a phone number, reply to the e-mail or click on a link to a phony Web site.

Since I’m a writer at Discover, I asked our e-mail security experts for tips on avoiding phishing and keeping e-mail secure. I think this is a pretty awesome list, one worth keeping handy.

• By marking unwanted e-mail as spam you actually help your e-mail provider better filter spam e-mail. For instance, spam filters have learned a very high spam probability for certain words and phrases like “reverses aging”, “free quote” and “refinance”. Click here for some cool info on the Bayesian filtering process.
• Add e-mail address(es) of the companies you do business with to your address book to create a “white list” of approved contacts that can go right to your in-box. This can help prevent legitimate e-mails from going to the spam folder.
• Look out for e-mail from an address similar to, but different from the one(s) the company usually uses.
• Beware of e-mails warning that you must update or verify your information immediately. Legitimate companies won’t send you e-mail insisting that you must immediately reply with confidential information or your account will be closed.
• If you get an e-mail asking you to “Verify your account information”, don’t reply or click on the link provided—even if the URL includes all or part of the real company’s name. Instead go to the company’s Web site yourself and fill out information there—or call the company to verify that the e-mail was from them.
• An easy way to verify links in the e-mail message: hover your mouse over the link. This will often show the full Web address. Be very careful when there are URL “shorteners” such as “bit.ly, snip,ip” and others in the URL field.
• Stay on top of your software! Use Internet Explorer 7/8 or other browsers with built-in phishing and smartscreen filters. Plus, when visiting sites that use “extended validation SSL certificates”, the explorer bar turns green on Internet Explorer & and other newer browsers.
• Make sure the “from” address matches the expected sender of the e-mail. (Don’t rely on the print version of the e-mail to reveal the headers—the ‘print’ function may omit important “From” header info.) While a good “From” header doesn’t ensure the e-mail is legitimate, a suspicious “From” header can indicate that it’s a phishing e-mail.
• If the e-mail contains references to information you provided for verification, such as your last four digits of a credit card number, double check that the digits provided actually match your accounts. (A lot of people don’t remember the last 4 digits of their account number.)
• If an e-mail asks you to call a particular phone number, verify that number by typing it into a search engine and looking up the name associated with the phone number.

Finally, I’ll add a tip of my own—if you see a lot of misspelled words and confusing language in an e-mail, be suspicious. Apparently phishers aren’t necessarily good spellers.

Want even more tips on using e-mail securely? Click here for e-mail and online safety tips from Discover. It’s always a good idea to check out the anti-phishing and security information on financial company Web sites.

How to be a know-it-all by using Discover Mobile Web

m.discover.com

I like knowing things. I look at my checking account online several times a week. If something is amiss I want to know about it right away. If there’s a transaction I don’t recognize, I track it down.

The Web is a great tool to help me stay as up to date as possible. As is the Discover site. Since I’m a cardmember as well as a Discover writer, I am on Discover.com a lot.

Actually there are two Discover cardmember sites, because there is also a new, mobile Web version of Discover.com. The mobile version of our Web site, m.discover.com, is an optimized version for viewing on your mobile phone or PDA.

You can use your mobile phone to go online and make sure you’re under your credit limit, pay a bill on time, view recent transactions and look over your account details. You could be standing in line to buy movie tickets and check your balance while you wait.

If your phone doesn’t have Web access (or if you’re like me and a bit of a technophobe), you can set up text reminders to be sent to your phone. This is very simple to do online by logging in to your account and clicking on the blue”My Profile” link at the very top of your account home page.

You may not know your tire inflation psi, or how to shoot a skyhook (or even what a skyhook is)—but at least you’ll know what’s going on with your Discover card account!

Analysis for the right brained.

Spend Analyzer

This is Nancy again, and today I want to talk to you about the Discover Spend Analyzer.

As a writer, math is not something I normally find interesting. Words like “analysis” scare me. Excel spreadsheets scare me. Because I am a math-phobic woman, I need a simple, entertaining and attractive way to view data.

I work at Discover as a copywriter, and am a cardmember, and have fallen deeply in like with the very cool personalized financial tools. Using the Spend Analyzer tool at Discover.com, even I (disproportionally right brained) can clearly determine where I’m spending my money with my Discover card.

There’s fun, user-friendly pie charts and graphs!

In Spend Analyzer, you can choose a time frame from one to 24 months and get a pie chart showing where you’ve spent by category and month.

I like Spend Analyzer because:

• There’s pie involved! I can click on a piece of the “spending pie” and see how much I spent—and in what category.
• I see how I’ve spent my money in categories like “Supermarket”, “Medical Services”, “Gasoline”, etc.
• Each category also gives me specifics on how much I spent and at what merchants. Even the specific merchant location.
• I can search transactions online to find info I need rather than run home and paw through my junk drawer looking for paperwork.

My Spend Analyzer just let me know:

I’ve spent a lot on maintenance and gas for my “affordable” clunker over the past two years.

What months I typically have more expenses—which gives me a heads up that I need to be prepared and budget accordingly.

There are a few places where I could cut back and save money. Cable TV, for instance. And gourmet coffee shipments. And my cell phone plan. And—I had no idea how much I spent on bookstores a year!

My top spending category for my Miles card is travel and entertainment, which, hooray, is where I can also earn Double Mile rewards.

Because I have a lot of my ongoing bills set up to be paid automatically with my Discover card it was very cool to be able to see all these fixed expenses, what months they fell, and how much they added up to over time. All in one convenient place, too.

For a unique, kaleidoscope analysis of your spending:

1. Go to Spend Analyzer.
2. View your Discover card spending for this month.
3. To the right of the date tabs are two directional arrows. Click the left arrow until you are as far back into your spending history as possible (3, 6, 9, 12 or 24 months).
4. Now click forward to see your spending patterns month over month.

Were there any surprises? Was it helpful to see this amount of detail? Did you like the colorful Spend Analyzer pie charts and bar graphs? Did you change anything spending-wise after getting a good look at your spending habits? Let me know. ~Nancy

Ensuring Discover.com Works for You

Quality Center - One of the tools we use for testing

If you’ve ever been frustrated with a Website, you may have asked, “Why hasn’t this site been tested?!” Discover.com is no exception. For me, however, anytime our customers encounter frustrating issues on Discover.com, it’s something that hits me personally. I manage the testing efforts across the entire Website. My team and I strive to prevent and solve any glitches.

You can rest assured that my team at Discover spends a great deal of time and effort to extensively test our Website. Our testers—whose sole job is to focus on the customer perspective, ensure we’re providing a smooth online experience. They put themselves in the place of our users and ask “Can I accomplish the task and does everything work as it should?”

So how do we go about doing this? We have labs and a host of computers that look at our Website on a variety of operating systems, across the current popular Web browsers, with a variety of configurations setup. (These are just a few of the things we look at!) While we try to be as extensive and detailed as possible, there is always a limited amount of time and an unlimited number of combinations, so we can’t test it all. We appreciate it when our customers tell us if something isn’t working right. Every week we study the most popular browser configurations that our cardmembers have when they visit Discover.com and use those statistics to drive our testing efforts. After all, nothing is more important to my team than ensuring that our online experience is the best in the industry.

If you have any questions or comments about how we go about testing, let us know through the Comments feature here.

Make your Discover rewards worth even more!

Discover Gift Cards

If you’re like me and use your Discover card for almost all your purchases, you can really see your Cashback Bonus or Miles rewards add up fast. Before you know it, you are sitting on a nice bank of rewards just waiting to be redeemed for something special.

I work on My Rewards at Discover.com, it’s the section of our secure Account Center where cardmembers can learn about ways to earn rewards and sign up for accelerated earning programs like 5% Cashback Bonus. In addition to learning about how to earn rewards faster, the Account Center is also a place where you can explore options for redeeming rewards. Even if you don’t have a lot of rewards saved up yet or you’re not ready to redeem, I find it’s helpful to see what options are available so I can have a goal in mind. Over the past year, we’ve added some new redemption options for cardmembers that really expand the range of choices.

Here are a few of my insider tips on what’s new:

First, you can now redeem for merchandise items. Whether you’re earning Cashback Bonus or Miles you can now redeem for items like the Apple iPod Nano, Samsung Blu-Ray player and Nikon Coolpix camera. But there’s a lot more to choose from. We’re looking forward to seeing how everyone likes the new options—so let us know what you think. Redeeming for merchandise is a great way to get gifts (for others or yourself) without having to spend money out of pocket—plus the shipping is free!

If merchandise isn’t your thing, we’ve also worked to get over 100 brand-name Partners that offer gift cards. By redeeming for gift cards, you can make your Cashback Bonus worth even more. For example, you could turn $20 Cashback Bonus into a $25 gift card, $40 Cashback Bonus into a $50 gift card, or $80 Cashback Bonus into a $100 gift card. We built in functionality that allows you to browse Partners by name, rewards value and category. We’re always adding Partners, so check out our New Partners page to see what’s new. Many of our Partners now offer eCertificates, which are available immediately upon completing your order, instead of waiting for a gift card to come in the mail. You can use your eCertificate to shop online or take it to the store with you.

The most recent addition to our redemption options is the Discover gift card. These cards can be used wherever Discover cards are accepted. Since the card can be personalized with a name and choice of design (you can browse all 12 design options in the Account Center), they make great gifts for someone else. Plus, there is no purchase fee or shipping charge when you redeem your rewards for a Discover gift card.

Take a look at the options for yourself the next time you are logged in to the Account Center and let me know what you think. How do you plan to use your rewards?

Redesigning Your Online Statement

Introducing: Your New Statement

You may have noticed that your Recent Activity & Statements on Discover.com went through some changes a few weeks ago. I was excited to manage that project because in the process, I learned a lot from our cardmembers about their needs and preferences.

From our site data, we know that our cardmembers have slowly upgraded to wider monitors so we took the extra space available and utilized it to provide the most important information to our cardmembers right on top of the pages. At a quick glance, you can now find your Cashback Bonus summary, current balance, payment due date, APR, finance charges and more.

From spending time in the usability lab, where we learn from our cardmembers as they interact with a test site, we found out that the size of the text on the pages can greatly impact a visitors experience and that our cardmembers have different needs. So we included the ability to view the page in three different text sizes.

Our cardmembers have long asked that we make their transactional data available to them in a visual format so we included two graphs: one shows you what you spent by category and the other (available on summaries) shows you your statements balance history. This makes it immediately apparent where your money is going and helps our cardmembers manage their budgets better.

Finally, we wanted to make it easier for our cardmembers to find specific transactions, now that we have data stretching two years back, so we introduced a new Search Transactions functionality.

The most important part of the Website to me, however, is the little link at the bottom of each page that allows our cardmembers to submit their feedback. The comments we receive really help us understand our cardmembers’ needs and guide our decisions. I make it a priority to personally read all of them. I am happy to see that many are excited about the new designs, and I’m taking suggestions for further improvements so we can continue to enhance the experience. Please keep the comments coming!