I moan a lot about poor Customer Service on here, so it's only fair sometimes to give credit where it's due.
I accept that in an imperfect world run by imperfect humans, sometimes things go wrong. Assuming the 'going wrong' isn't catastrophic, I can live with it, as long as they are resolved. But I am sick of tired of back-and-forth arguing with defensive businesses in denial which ends up causing more stress and inconvenience than the original fault.
In January, Jimmy received his credit card bill which showed a charge for the hotel we stayed at in Valencia. This surprised me, because we had already paid up-front via ebookers. I know I should have got onto it straight away, but fear of endless toing-and-froing turned it into a Round Tuit. My lame self-justifying excuse being that I wasn't sure whether my problem was with ebookers, the hotel or the credit card company.
Finally, on Wednesday, I emailed ebookers explaining the situation.
Within 13 hours they responded:
When the reservation was made, we supplied the hotel with our payment details in the form of a "single use credit card". The hotel should have charged us upon you checking out and should not have charged you. I can only apologise for any inconvenience caused. Our hotel department are aware of this issue and will be following this matter up with the suppliers and hotel chains to ensure that all properties are aware of the single use credit card procedure.
I have asked the hotel to refund you and will contact you again when I receive their confirmation.
I was astounded. Really amazed. I shouldn't be, but I was. So, thanks to Lucy at ebookers, who demonstrated how to get it right
- respond swiftly
- write in plain, correct, but not dumbed-down English
- don't blame the customer
- apologise
- explain what she is doing to rectify the situation for me personally
- explain what she is doing to reduce the chance of this happening to someone else in the future
Hopefully, neither Lucy nor I are going to have waste time exchanging increasingly hostile emails when both of us have better things to do with our time.
On a separate note, I ordered a new laptop online on Saturday. When I went to pay, my card was rejected. I made an (incorrect) assumption that this was a result of me having registered my previous card with the pop-up box which requests three characters from a password for further verification, and having replaced that card recently.
So I rang up and was greeted with a message "NatWest Fraud line"
The upshot was that the particular retailer I was using is a big target for card fraud - highly desirable consumer electronic goods. Fair enough, I understand the reasons for the extra precautions. I'm even willing to swallow the hogwash that it's for my protection when really I'm very much third in consideration after the bank and the retailer.
What I don't like is the manner in which it was done. I didn't like the message 'Your card has been declined' when it should have been 'This card transaction requires extra verification; please contact us to complete the transaction.' And I do not like being greeted with a message that implies that an attempted fraud is in progress. What happened to presumption of innocence? I think most people can cope conceptually with an occasional need to take further steps to verify something.
I did suggest to the - very pleasant - call-handler that Anti-Fraud would be better than Fraud. But actually, I'm not so sure. As I say, I understand the high incidence of fraud in this type of transaction, and I understand and support the desire to reduce fraud.
But the end result is that potentially every genuine customer (perhaps over a materiality threshold) is assumed to be a fraudster unless they can prove otherwise. Which is a perversion of jurisprudence and really bad customer relations. If they changed the wording it would not in anyway change the procedures and system, but it is still my reaction to start trembling and worrying that my card has been declined because of insufficient funds, even when I know this not to be the case.
Is this just me being an auditor, I wonder?
