August 18,2007

Phone Customer Service

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Why does over-the-phone customer service have to suck so much? I feel like there are fifty times more bad customer service stories than good customer service stories. Riddle me this… how is this scenario a “service” to me the “customer”?

I get a phone call today from Express, the clothing store. It is the billing department asking me to pay the minimum fee on my 2 months overdue credit card. Funny, I haven’t been contacted once in the past two months in regards to this bill, no paper statement, no e-mail statement. But this person wasn’t interested in this, she was only interested in having me pay my minimum fee. Fair enough, only she kept trying to persuade me that “I only needed to pay $50″ even though I made it clear to here that I always pay my credit cards off on time and in full. So I finally convince her to charge me the full amount, then she tells me on top of everything that I will get charged a $7 fee since this was over the phone. Great!!

So I log onto my online account to see if I can at least get more information than this woman gave me. I see that I had indeed paid my bill on time over a month or so ago, and that it had been “no fault returned” a week or so after. Hmmm… so, I pay my bill on time, you return my money, don’t call more or tell me for a month or so, and then expect me to pay all your late fees and charges. Wonderful, wonderful.

I call up customer service and explain the situation. The customer service representative unsympathetically tells me that it was an input error on their side that got my bank account wrong, so they will waive the late fee as a “one-time courtesy”. I ask her why I was never called or e-mailed, and if this ever happened in the future, if they could make sure to call or e-mail me so that I am not late on my payments. She explained that depending on where the error happens in the system, there is no way they can assure me I will be contacted. But, I’m sure that if I don’t pay on time I will be instantly penalized for it, they can assure that.

So, she reads me off the new amount I will be charged, and I see that it is above the amount I owe… oh, but I forgot about that $7 phone fee. So, I pay online on time, your mistake causes my payment not to go through, and because of that I now have to pay over the phone… and I’m being charged extra for it. Yep, but she tells me she is actually saving me money because if I paid online right now it wouldn’t go through in time and I’d be charged another $20 late fee. So they are actually saving me $13!!!

So, I guess $7 in the end isn’t that big a deal, but when you add in the time I lost today on the phone with two different people, the gross sense of frustration on my otherwise nice weekend, and whatever points I’ve lost on my credit score for failing to pay the card on time (no way Express can help me out there)… was it really worth the 10% I saved on my clothing purchase by opening that account? No, especially considering all unnecessary marketing I have now opened myself up to by giving Express my information.

Bottomline, the next time you are tempted by one of these “just sign up, it’s so easy” deals, think about whether it is really worth it in the long run.