The Squeaky Wheel Rides Again!

Yesterday, my husband attempted to use our credit card at Home Depot. It was declined. That has never happened to us and it was surprising. I was at home when this occurred so I immediately thought that someone may have stolen our credit card information and charged it up to our substantial credit limit. I logged into our account and was puzzled. There were no rogue charges, no notification about possible stolen account numbers. All that was there that looked amiss was a tiny red note saying our account was past due (5 days past due!)

I normally pay my bills through online banking Bill Pay. This is a good system that can virtually insure that your payments arrive on time. I get the paper bill in the mail, I sit at my computer, log into BillPay and enter the payment information, then I am DONE. I had to retrace these steps to figure out why our payment was late. There was no payment in my bill payment queue. There was no payment that had already gone out for this month. HMMMMM...and lastly I didn't have the paper bill at all. AHA! That was the problem with my system. The bill never arrived so I never sat down and scheduled a payment for this card. What still bothered me, although it was my fault it didn't get paid, was that we have been cardholders with this bank for 18 years, we have a high credit limit, pay our card off monthly, and still they declined the card for a small unpaid balance. I was fixing for a fight with my credit card company this morning.

Customer service people are not always helpful, not always intelligent ,and don't always speak clearly enough to be understood. With this in mind, I dialed the customer service number and hoped to get a smart, English speaking customer service rep who had the authority to remedy this situation. I was irritated by the $39 late fee, and $16.50 in interest charges, but mostly that we were declined. I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised. Nancy answered my call after I got through the labyrinth of prompts and "pressed 6 for customer service." She was apologetic, she had authority to wipe out those charges, she asked politely if she could put me on hold to check out why we were declined even though we were less than 10% into our credit limit.

FYI, if you are late with a payment, a credit card company is compelled to put a hold on your account until you pay at least your minimum payment. Query: If this is common procedure amongst credit card companies, why are so many people in so much credit card debt trouble? Are they just making minimum payments every month just to keep the credit flowing? STUPID! These are the people that need to be declined!

Nancy got rid of the late charges and the interest charge. I thought since I was on a roll, I would ask for a lower interest rate. WHAMMO! I got it. We were at 14.99% and they lowered us to 7.99% for a 6 month period. I will ask again when it resets in 6 months. In my case, this morning anyway, the squeaky wheel got greased so well it is rolling down the Autobahn.

I have not always been as happy with my customer service experiences. Two slightly more negative examples come to mind.

I had ordered a leather jacket from Wilson's Leather online. With special online promotions and free shipping it came to about $180. When it arrived, it did not fit well, so I decided to try to return it to a Wilson's store and get a different size. Before I could do that, a few days later, another of the same jacket arrived in the same wrong size. I checked my credit card statement and was only billed for 1. Strange. I called the toll free number for Wilson's and told the rep of my situation. She said they had no record of shipping the second jacket. She had no idea what to do about jacket #2. She was not helpful in any way. I knew I had 2 options and one was the right thing to do, the other was the fun thing to do. As I saw it my options were to either go to the Wilson's store with both jackets, return both and get (1 of )the right size jacket. The other option was to exchange jacket #1 for the right size and keep jacket #2 and sell it on Ebay. Believing in Karma as I do, I opted for the honest path. One thing bothered me though. When I returned both jackets to the sales person at the Wilson's store and explained the situation to her, it is entirely possible that she could have chosen my second option and sold it on Ebay herself and the company would have been none the wiser. I only know that her karma will take care of her if she did that!

My second example of a bad, and really odd customer service experience I had was a bird feeder I bought my husband for Father's Day 2 years ago. I ordered the Droll Yankee Flipper in order to watch it spin squirrels off of it when they attempted to eat the bird seed. It is a very funny thing to watch . We have had a lot of laughs watching them spin. We actually counted and one squirrel spun around about 20 times before jumping off. See Yankee Flipper here:
http://drollyankees.com/products/product-videos.html choose Video number 4

I had seen this feeder in a store for $125 and saw it on Amazon for $89.95. The catch was you had to opt for a free one month membership to Amazon Prime and you could have next day delivery for $9.95. So I did that. Well, Father's day came and went and no Yankee Flipper arrived. I called Amazon on Father's Day eve to complain (squeaky wheel rides again) and try to at least get my $9.95 refunded since it didn't show up on time. There was a long pause and a strange sound when I connected to the customer service department of Amazon. Oh no! INDIA! The customer service rep had an extremely thick Indian accent and didn't understand common American speech patterns. He could speak English, but clearly didn't understand what I was telling him about my situation. I explained it 3 times; I told him I wanted my shipping costs refunded. At the end of the call, I was not sure what would happen. He did say that I would get my shipping refunded, or at least that is what I thought it sounded like he said. The next day, Monday, the feeder arrived. On Wednesday I checked my credit card statement online and saw that Amazon had credited the entire $89.95 plus $9.95 shipping to my account! I don't think that is what he intended to do but this time around karma be damned, I was not going to spend another 20 minutes on the phone to India explaining how they needed to charge me back for the feeder.

I think between the leather coat drama ($180.00credit ) and the bird feeder fiasco($100debit ) karma was still mathematically in my favor!

I have one last homage to questionable customer service. Two years ago, my family had dinner at Longhorn Steakhouse in our town. It was a nice meal and we were had just finished eating. In fact we were waiting for the waiter to bring us our check ,which we estimated would be about $90.00-$100.00. The restaurant was full and it was taking him a long time to bring our check. All of a sudden , a loud alarm began going off and we saw smoke pouring from the kitchen. The manager told all of the patrons to leave the restaurant in an orderly fashion, no need to run, but there was a fire in the kitchen. We went outside and stood there for about 1/2 hour. Some of the patrons left right away driving off in the middle of their dinners. A few stragglers like us stayed behind to pay our bill. The fire department told everyone to leave the parking lot and that nobody would be let back in for hours. Reluctantly we left. We debated what to do. There was no way for them to know who we were since they had not taken our credit card yet. The next day, my husband called Longhorn to say we wanted to pay our bill from the previous night since we had eaten the whole meal. The person that answered the phone looked up our bill and told us we could come in at any time that day. I was half expecting the manager to say "forget it, nobody else paid and insurance covers it" but he took our credit card and swiped it, and let us pay for our dinner. He also told us that out of a full restaurant, only one other patron had come back to pay. There was no offer of a gift card, no extra thanks, no nothing! Looking back, I think this was very poor customer service on his part. We were honest, when no one else was, and he failed to recognize that. It is not that I was looking for a freebie, but under the circumstances, it seems to me that this manager should have encouraged us to return to his restaurant.

Over the years I have always been a squeaky wheel to right wrongs and correct problems. There are so many little frustrations that come into our lives every day! It is almost a part time job to get other people to correct their mistakes.

My moral for today is (back to my credit card scenario) complain, but politely. Let people know, in a calm way, what you expect, and what you want to happen. They will be much more receptive to calm than to cranky. If they cannot meet your expectations, you can tell them you will shop around for other services, products, whatever. At least then you will feel you did whatever you could to remedy a wrong and you won't stew about it.