Tuesday, March 13, 2007

A Bad Customer Experience

It's amazing. For the first time ever I am not happy with a company! Wow I feel like a real bastard consumer (even though I didn't get angry or anything like that).

With a marked change (for the better!) in my financial situation over the last couple of weeks I decided to get a new phone, a Samsung X820. Very nice. Jim wanted one too and we found a good deal with The 3G Shop. I applied and knowing how fraud checks work (after all, it was my job until a couple of months ago) I wasn't surprised when I got a call the next day (from a lovely sounding guy) asking me to send a copy of my passport and bank statement. I happily obliged and sent it in this morning. Obviously I didn't want to show my transactions so I covered those up (as my company allows our customers to do, we only want to confirm you are who you say you are before parting with our expensive stuff).

I phoned them up a little while ago just to check up on things. After a few minutes the agent told me they'd received them but couldn't accept my statement... they wanted to see the transactions! When he told me this I could tell from the fear in his voice it wasn't something he agreed with and obviously something he was used to be abused by the customers for.

I didn't abuse him (he seemed like a nice chap). I just cancelled my order and took my money elsewhere. In the grand scheme of things that's far more effective.

Darn silly rules if you ask me. The company I work for has one of the lowest fraud rates for online business' and one of the best customer service track records. 3G have got a bloody jobsworth in their fraud department who's probably costing them more in lost sales than saving in stopping fraud.

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