Customer Service

I work in Customer Service.  I think service is important.


I've had two spectacular Customer Service Failures this week, from people connected with my finances.


They're connected too.  Here's the tale of woe.


For a little while, I played a popular MMO game.  Then I went about a month without really thinking too much about the game, so I decided to cancel my subscription.  When I made the decision I thought I might sign into the game and give away in character gold to deserving causes.  When I tried to sign in, I couldn't.  My account had been hacked.  I went through the recommended processes of recovering my account, including an exhaustive clearing of my PC - which turned out to not be at fault.  I reset the passwords for everything that I do online.  It took a week to sort out.  After that, I played with the account for a few days and then got bored and let it idle for another month.


When I tried to cancel the subscription - because I decided to donate that money to a charity instead of a service I'm not using - I discovered the account had been hacked again and now I can't recover it.  I called the company.


Their phone line informed me it was too busy, and hung up on me.


I called again.  This time, the call centre was closed due to unspecified emergency conditions.


The third time I called, I was told that the line was once more too busy.


I tried using the website.  There's no option to cancel your subscription without having an active account. 


I called my bank.  I asked to cancel the payment.  They told me in order to cancel the payment I needed to cancel my entire card.  Replacing the card would take about a week and if I needed to make any purchases in that week I could call them and they'd authorise access to my money.


Of course, this means I need to go through everything I do online and change my card details anywhere that's got a regular payment going out of it.  And it's likely to come to that, because I can't reach the game company, who have the worst customer service ethic I've ever seen.  So, just after payday this month, I'm going to bin my card and ask the bank to send me a new one.  Then there will be a complaint made to the game company, in which I'll ask how they intend to make this right.  It'll be interesting to see how they respond.  


One thing's for certain.  I'm looking into changing banks, and the game company will never, ever see another penny of my cash.