Include the ability to turn off notifications/and or features for the New Expensify Card

KeithG · January 15

What a disaster. I guess Expensify is not for Enterprise clients.

Daveweez · January 15

This is causing a lot of confusion from my employees as well. The call to action makes it seem like we have turned on this feature for our employees, so now they are expecting a Expensify card ASAP.

I understand the idea of marketing to employees to create demand from the ground up, but you are making us Admins all look bad. We need to plan for change management, but what you did is forcing our hands and making us look bad when we have to tell our employees that we are not implementing this feature at the moment.

Jeez, have some common sense here.

donnie · January 15

Agree with other posts in this string. This makes it look like the admins are not in control of the processes or system on top of the confusion it is/has caused regarding what the program is and whether or not we are using it - we are not and while we were considering it before we are absolutely not given the control issues now

ExpensifyUser228 · January 15

Our company has been "preapproved" for the Expensify Card -- I never applied for it nor wanted it. Now our employees are being spammed and told to "tell us where to send your new Expensify card!" This has cause headaches and confusion for us. Per Expensify, there is no way to turn this "feature" off or make them stop spamming our users.

The way you are going about promoting your Expensify card -- [1] by forcing companies to "re-authenticate" their bank accounts via Plaid so that you can get more transaction history, [2] by spamming our users with confusing marketing messages and to-do's in the product, and [3] by not letting admins turn off the Expensify card or control messages to our own employees -- is in poor taste and poor customer service. We will be looking to move to a more credible, less "shameless self-promotion" company.

Matt_Jawlik · January 15

My response from support, a full day later: "...you are in complete control of this program -- no card will be sent to any employee without you explicitly assigning them an unapproved expense limit. Since we launched this program, employees have been asking us for a way to request this feature from their company. "

Clearly, as an admin I'm not in control of this program, otherwise I would not have allowed these emails and prompts to go out. Per @Corinne Ofstad above, Expensify isn't in control of it. No one, it appears, is in control of this program, which is quite obvious at this point in time.

Steve_123456 · January 15

admins need the ability to turn off these misleading emails ASAP. at the least, marketing emails should come from some [email protected] address instead of the concierge address. I'm really disappointed that expensify has used such misleading marketing tactics.

chrismcknight · January 15

The introductory of this card program to all users is causing a lot of confusion at my company.

Expensify - please give us admins the ability to stop this sales pitch to our employees. I'm being contacted by employees left and right and it's very distracting to everyone involved at a time when my team really needs focus. Please make it stop.

Jordan_S · January 15

Just wanted to echo all of the prior posts in this thread, and share that this marketing campaign is also causing mass confusion in my company.

It's frustrating enough that unsolicited marketing emails are being sent to my employees, with no way of being turned off. What's even more frustrating is how confusing the emails are, being sent by the Concierge to create the appearance of an action item. I'm being flooded by messages from employees about whether we're changing our credit cards, if they need to complete the form to maintain an account, and other general messages of confusion.

No idea what Expensify was thinking here, and I'm frustrated and disappointed.

Jonanna · January 16

This being turned on without the ability to turn this feature off is bordering on fraud! What a nightmare and horrible business decision. Stop charging us if you are going to sell our information for every piece of data we send you...this is ridiculous.

Vinny · January 16

They are ignoring us until they’ve emailed every user. Once they’ve have completed their launch we’ll get a mea culpa and a switch to close the barn door now that the cow is gone.

ElAarono · January 16

I am completely embarrassed that I've invited my users to use Expensify and now they are being hounded to sign up for a card and there is nothing that I can do about it.

MarkC · January 16

Totally agree with all of the above. Absolutely ridiculous to be blasting out emails and notifications when you log in about this card. Totally self-serving. Direct these to the admins and not every employee

Ryan Schaffer · January 16

Hey everybody! Sorry for this mishap, we have an update going out shortly that should fix it.

In short, we had some notifications that were not sent in the correct order.

Many employees were sent a message asking for their address so we could send them a card. This message shouldn't be sent until the employees have had card limits set for their account by their admin. Obviously, sending this message before an admin has set card limits for the employee doesn't make sense.

A fix for this is going live soon and employees will not be asked for their mailing address until their admin has set them a card limit. Thank you for raising this to our attention and sorry for the confusion. We appreciate you!

Jordan_S · January 16

Following up on my earlier post to share that I complained to customer support - and they only doubled down on their marketing efforts.

"We've had a ton of great feedback from the companies that have started using the card so far. Would you like me to tell you more about how it can make your expense reporting process even more efficient?"

What is going on here, Expensify? Your customers are saying that your marketing efforts are disruptive and confusing, but you don't seem to care or understand.

Daveweez · January 16

Thank you @Ryan Schaffer - appreciate it.

KatieScoular · January 16

@Ryan Schaffer are you also getting rid of the "to do" item in the employees Expensify inbox? Are you going to not send marketing emails from your CEO to all of our employees going forward? Because the email notifications that requested their address is only part of the issue.

Julia · January 16

@Ryan Schaffer
Thanks for the update and the action on your end. These are some great first steps. I hope you take everyone's feedback into consideration and take action to change how this is currently being marketed and presented.

david_wheat · January 17

We just blocked all emails from [email protected] Feels like a start...

Vinny · January 20

Our spam came from [email protected] which sends necessary emails as well so the block won't work from us. I second @KatieScoular - how to we turn off all non-transactional emails to our users? Spam the admins all you like, but our users should never get emails we don't approve.

KatieScoular · January 21

@Ryan Schaffer is this how you fix it? Changing the notification to be less misleading but still putting it in all of our users' inboxes?

I don't want anyone asking me to give them this card, period. This happened at the worst possible time for us because we're rolling out a new credit card program here - so not only do we not need this at all, but it's giving confusing messaging to our employees.

Please take this notice out of our employees' inboxes and do not send more advertising to them:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6030147/uploads/editor/kk/2kqa8ncgxhwh.png

Zany Renney · January 21

Hi there @KatieScoular

The change in the Inbox Task was designed to clarify the process of getting a card but you are not obligated to get this feature if you do not want to.
I appreciate you taking the time to write in, would you be able to share what is it about this other card program that makes it more suited for you than the Expensify Card?
We're trying to open a dialogue with our customers as we are trying to understand how to create a more useful expense management platform for our customers. One aspect of which was to give customers access to a free card that makes managing expenses even easier.
I look forward to hearing back from you.

Jonanna · January 21

@Zany Renney...I would recommend step 1 in the "useful expense management platform" would be to check with administrators instead of force feeding your personal agenda onto unsuspecting users and violating confidential information in order for people to trust your product. At this point in time, the trust has been lost that Expensify can perform simple tasks to the benefit of their existing clients.

Daveweez · January 21

@Zany Renney

Please note that @Ryan Schaffer said:

In short, we had some notifications that were not sent in the correct order.

Many employees were sent a message asking for their address so we could send them a card. This message shouldn't be sent until the employees have had card limits set for their account by their admin. Obviously, sending this message before an admin has set card limits for the employee doesn't make sense.

A fix for this is going live soon and employees will not be asked for their mailing address until their admin has set them a card limit. Thank you for raising this to our attention and sorry for the confusion. We appreciate you!

This makes me think that if Joanna did not set a card limit, then this card will not show up in the inbox. Can you confirm if that is correct or if I misunderstood?

houstron · January 21

Per the inbox message:

"Congrats! Your team qualifies for the Expensify card. All that's left to do is ask your company to enable it"

No, your team does not qualify if the card is not enabled. You have this all backwards expensify.

You should be aligned with us Admins and selling us on the benefits, not selling to our team, opposed to this, you are strong-arming us through our employees through your platform and direct CEO emails to users that clearly cross on how user data should be utilized.

Your pivot to a credit card processing company has been poorly executed and has left many of us looking for alternative platforms when we were previously pretty happy.

KatieScoular · January 21

@Zany Renney I understand that I'm not obligated but a big part of everyone's problem with this is that our users are being advertised a feature we aren't using. It's very misleading and frustrating to have employees reach out to me to ask for their card. I also hate that the "hide" option for this notice says "I'll ask them in person", implying that they have to ask for it.. implying that we're using it.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time fixing your problems for you, but in general - the other program we're using has a built in approval system with it and gives out virtual cards to purchasers, not physical cards. This allows us to take some of the spend out of our AP process without letting people go wild with cards. Your program might make sense for a small company but I'm not giving out what's essentially a debit card - tied to the company's bank account - to anyone at our company. Not even our CEO can just take money out of the bank account without anyone knowing.

This would be like if our payroll company sent an email to our employees saying "we now offer the ability to get an advance on your paycheck - just ask your HR team to get started". That would be completely fine if it went out to the admins or the HR team at large, but it would be crazy if it went to every employee.

sushicat_san · January 21

Expensify - this is not OK with enterprise users. Admins need to be in control of this process BEFORE you make a mass marketing campaign to OUR end users. I understand that us admins ultimately decide to implement or not, but the messages are creating a lot of confusion for our end users. It comes across as a slimy sales technique to us admins, regardless of intention.

This issue, the 2600 word email from the CEO, and the recent outage since 1/17 (which the status site says started on 1/20) is making it really hard to make the case to stay with Expensify.

CController · January 21

When our employees log in, they now get this massive gif asking them to ask to be signed up for a Visa credit card. It's confusing our employees. They think we're issuing credit cards now. How is this at all OK?

MSab · January 21

The fact there isn't an option for a company's admin to control the messaging that appears on every employee's main page is ridiculous. This is a very unprofessional way of rolling out a new product and the product/marketing team at Expensify needs to go back to the drawing board on how B2B sales works.

WooHooWu · January 22

Wow, I am so glad I decided to search the community forums to see if other companies are dealing with this same problem! I wouldn't be surprised if Expensify lost a lot of their customers in 2020... I mean, how hard is it to stop sending our users email to get them to sign up for the Expensify card? Instead, their reaction is just "ignore the request." Such poor customer support...

ScotMosley · January 22

Yes, please stop advertising to my employees. We have already reviewed the card and decided as a company that we will not be moving forward. My employees are not sending me emails because they want your card...they are sending me emails because they are confused and frustrated by the aggressive marketing. Find another way to advertise, but don't charge us to use your service and then use service to advertise to our members. This is SPAM, especially since the USER can't even turn it off (I've tried multiple times to say the I'm not personally interested and I still see ads about it).

Include the ability to turn off notifications/and or features for the New Expensify Card

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