So there are some transactions online when you have multiple screens to go through before completing the transaction, and sometimes I’m waiting for the point in the transaction where I enter something specific to the transaction that will change it, but I don’t know what screen it’s going to be on. Twice in the recent past I have made it through all the way to the end of the transaction and have been told the transaction is complete when I was still waiting to enter in the other information I had, leading me to have to call customer service.
And of course, customer service is usually less than helpful. Despite calling immediately after the order goes through, there’s nothing they can do. They can’t escalate the call. The policy is that the orders are final. I can understand not letting some phone jockey do it, but why can’t there be someone with more authority to be able to reach into the system and monkey around with it a bit to get the outcome that I’m looking for? Are they so super-paranoid about security that they can’t have some trusted administrator go in and do these kinds of things? They just flat out won’t do them at all?
Instance 1:
I go on binges purchasing music that I discovered on Pandora every couple years. I then burn them onto an MP3 CD that my car can play, so I prefer buying MP3s from Amazon over buying them on iTunes where I then have to convert them. The whole reason I went to buy the songs at this time was I got a new credit card that would reward me if I bought $1000 of stuff within 3 months. My normal CC bill is $300 a month, so I thought I’d buy some stuff I don’t normally that I’d been meaning to.
However, I since I don’t do it very often, I have no idea when the transaction will be complete. As I go to complete the transaction I expect it to show me something about my payment method and allow me to change it. But no. I think I also had the same issue a couple years ago when I bought music from Amazon, but it was a very vague memory that only surfaced when I realized I had just completed the order without changing my payment method to my new card.
I figure the charge is still pending, so maybe customer service can cancel it as long as I don’t actually download the songs. I call and they tell me there’s nothing they can do right now while it’s still pending, and I get an email suggesting that they’re still waiting on it completing to be able to help me. When it is completed a few days later, the guy I get at customer service now tells me there’s nothing they can do now that it’s completed.
Apparently the fact that all I wanted to do was change which card the charge was on wasn’t enough to get them to refund my money on one card and charge another, despite me calling them literally a minute after making the purchase and telling them I made a mistake. I wasn’t going to cost them money at all, but apparently there was just nothing they could do. Really? Nothing? You couldn’t initiate a charge on my new card and then wait for it to be approved and then refund the old card? You couldn’t get in there and cancel it?
It’s even more utterly ridiculous if they had actually looked at my customer history, which should have told them that I was on the verge of purchasing a whole lot more songs than just that one order, having been artificially limited to 50 by the size of my cart. Instead, they have an extremely irate customer who is totally willing to go back to iTunes and spend $100 there since Amazon makes it way too easy to complete an order without telling you that this click is the last one needed, and then won’t do something that seems absolutely within their power to do when a paying customer is requesting it that doesn’t lose them any business at all and at worst costs them a little in CC fees. They’re willing to take the risk that I won’t go elsewhere with future business instead of having systems available to make things right when something can easily go wrong.
Well, I did go elsewhere, and I will continue to go elsewhere to buy music. Fuck you, Amazon music. I’m done with you. It’s obvious you’re a completely different branch of the business than the rest of Amazon, which has an entirely different payment system, so I don’t feel bad at all using the rest of Amazon.
Instance 2:
I get an offer in the mail from Fifth Third bank to open a new account, deposit some money and leave it in there for a couple months and be given some huge amount of bonus interest relative to the amount of money and the time period I need to keep it in there. They have an offer code that I need to enter, and I go online to set up an account since they work banker’s hours at the closest branch, and so do I. On the initial screen to open an account there’s a place to put an offer code, but when I try it, it says that I can’t use that code at this time. It asks me to continue, and my assumption is I’ll be able to use it later in the process, just not then, because it specifically said “at this time”, not “not online” which is the real problem.
So I give them enough information to steal my identity, and I have no clue how many screens I have to go through entering information and agreeing to terms and conditions, and I keep following the process. There’s 3 steps in the banner at the top of the screen, but there’s far more than 3 screens. All of a sudden, after one of them, it says that my account is now created. There never was somewhere else to put in an offer code.
I’m steamed. I look closer at the offer literature and it said to go in to a branch or call a particular number. So I call that number. They tell me there’s nothing they can do now that I created the account, I’ll have to go into a branch to get them to apply my code to my account.
Now, in neither of these cases am I really out anything of value. In the first case, I got the goods that I paid for, I simply would have preferred to pay differently. In the second, I am merely inconvenienced by having to go to a further away branch in order to get into the lobby on Saturday or taking time off work (haha, like that’s going to happen this time of year). But to me it just shows how poorly online systems are designed that it is incredibly easy for people to complete transactions that they wanted to modify before completing simply because they were not painfully aware that this one “Continue” button was the absolute point of no return. And to compound that, customer service is utterly useless in trying to solve what should be a very simple problem. I’m not trying to do anything that I wouldn’t be able to do if I had just known the correct way to do it, but because I passed that point of no return without having modified the transaction how I wanted to, they simply can’t help me.
WHY THE FUCK NOT?! WHAT KIND OF MONKEY DESIGNED YOUR SYSTEMS THAT YOU CAN’T HAVE A TRUSTED ADMINISTRATOR FIX THINGS TO WORK THE WAY YOUR CUSTOMER WANTED BUT DIDN’T QUITE GET BECAUSE YOUR INTERFACE IS FUCKING AWFUL? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? DO YOU WANT PEOPLE TO BE RESENTFUL OF YOU?
I don’t even have a way of getting back at Fifth Third, because I was going to totally abuse their offer and close my account as soon as possible with my bonus intact. I wasn’t even considering keeping it open like the previous one I got a bonus on that I now use as my ATM account since they have a branch in walking distance from my home and my other bank doesn’t. I have no way to get back at Fifth Third for this absolutely atrocious customer service protocol except rant in the Pit at the Dope.