How To Lose Longtime Customers
Oil companies don’t want to be in the credit card business, which they farm out to financial companies on various consignment basis. Here’s a good example of bad things that happen when the two companies’ customer information gets out of sync. Bogus late charges are bad enough; wanting to verify SSNs without any verifiable security is beyond the pale.
I’ve had one particular oil company charge card for close to 17 years. I’ve always settled my monthly bills before they were due, and have been using electronic payment for several years now.
So I was surprised when this month’s bill included a late charge for the previous month’s bill. I checked with my bank, and saw that the electronic payment cleared days before the due date on the bill. It seems that I wasn’t alone in getting hit for a bogus late charge. There are a lot of angry postings on the internet, and very pointed references to banks getting called on the carpet for this not all that long ago. Maybe they figure that most people will not scrutinize their bills, and the rest, presumably few in number, can have the late charge removed as a courtesy and obvious sign of good will.
I attempted to use the oil company’s web site to send a captured email to get this corrected. But, I was unable to do so because the SSN I’ve had since an early age is different from the one the oil company had on record, and the only way to correct this is for me to mail or fax a copy of my SS card to some address in Northern California. Not going to happen.
I then called the customer service 800-number, and eventually got to an operator who was very sorry but could do nothing because my SSN is not the same as the one the oil company has on file, and …. It is unfortunate that the customer service personnel have to take the heat for problems they neither made nor are able to influence or correct.
I then wrote a letter to the oil company’s top officers describing the two problems: the bogus late charge and the requirement for me to expose my SSN so they can correct their problem. I also filed the appropriate notifications with the major credit bureaus. And that, I thought, was that. End of story.
But it isn’t. Today I got a call from the financial company that has the oil company’s credit card business. Very nice and professional, the late charge will be waived (notice the arabesque around proof), and all I need to do to fix the SSN problem was to tell this nice voice over the phone my SSN. Not going to happen. Anything if not persistent, I was asked why I was being…firm on this. So I patiently explained that they are just a voice over a phone, I have no way to validate them, while they have plenty of ways they can validate me, starting with my phone number that shows up on their computer screen, which with the fact that I’ve had that particular oil company card for some time should be sufficient. How the SSN got lost or garbled or whatever wasn’t my problem. The voice over the phone then mentioned that the latest reorganization and consolidation did have some problems, but everything’s fine now. Which I took to mean that all the customer information has, in effect, been sent offshore. Not a pleasant sensation and the implications of that did not interest me. No SSN.
I don’t like my time wasted, and I’m quite sure that the nice voice over the phone doesn’t like their time wasted either. Bottom line for the last time: No SSN, by voice, by document copy, period. If this is a problem then I’ll cut up the card and mail the pieces back (it is their card after all).
Hopefully that’s the end of it. But I’ll never know. Maybe my name will now appear on some Bad Guy’s list, my credit will be destroyed without notice or explanation, I’ll loose the business and the house and the cars and everything, my wife will leave me, and I’ll and wind a homeless person wandering around in a daze somewhere in San Gabriel Valley.
Tags: customer service, information security, late charges, oil companies, SSN