I’ve got a debit card transaction showing up that I most definitely did not make. It’s nothing too serious or sinister. There are no identity thieves or russian mobsters involved. I spoke with the merchant and was told the transaction would be canceled (it was still in “pending” limbo), but today I checked and it had actually posted to my account. So I called Visa.
Now, the people with whom I interacted were great. Easy to understand, nice mood…just generally very genial. What was frustrating to me was the totally useless process of navigating the telephone menu.
You call and, less another two or three items, it goes something like this:
Press 2 for English.
Enter your card number followed by the pound key.
If you want to dispute a debit charge, press 2.
And then you wait. When the customer service rep answers, he/she asks “What can I help you with”?
I just followed a path that included “pressing 2 to dispute a debit charge”, so I figure he/she should already know that. But instead of pointing that out I just “I want to dispute a charge”. The response: “Let me connect you to the disputes department”.
Crap. This is where, out of my four calls to Visa, I was twice disconnected after waiting for around eight minutes.
The other two times, the successful connections begin a bit better because the rep already knows you want to dispute a charge (after all, they’re in that department). Instead they ask for your card number. The same one I typed in the phone when calling? Yes, the very same.
Why do they have you navigate the system like that when, in the end, you end up talking with someone who apparently is not in the loop? I know that when I’ve had to call my cell phone provider, which uses voice recognition, I got in the habit of just straight away saying “OPERATOR”. And that’s it. Hitting ‘0′ right off the bat on the Visa line didn’t seem to do the trick though.
I guess there’s the automated tracking of “why” and “who” that occurs with telephone menus. On the other end of the line a large cluster of machines is tracking each and every 2 and 4 and 1. At the end of the month, the managers know just how many callers chose to conduct business en Espagnol. So how hard would it be to pipe that information to the customer service rep’s screen?
Picture this as your greeting:
Hello Mr. Thomas. I see you have a charge on your debit card that you would like to dispute. Do you have a fax number or email address where I can send the proper forms?