Boyink! - Spring Forward on the Web

Have you ever constested a charge on your credit card bill? 

I hadn’t, but a recent interchange with a software company left me less than satisfied so I decided to get the credit card company involved, since that’s one of the benefits of card usage that always gets touted.

So far it seems to be a game of “let’s see how serious this guy is by making him jump through silly hoops”. 

I started by calling the phone number on the back of my credit card.  The call was answered quickly and the card representative was friendly and personable, but I couldn’t initiate the dispute until the charge was posted (logical enough) and had to do it at the website.

So in a few days the charge appeared on the credit card website, and I followed the site link that began the process of disputing the charge.  Immediately the site started asking for information that I had just been looking at on a previous screen - merchant name, dollar amount, date posted, etc.  Since my memory for details is terrible, I opened up the website in a second tab and began cutting and pasting the information from one screen to the other.  On the same website. 

Silly!  How about a way to select a charge to dispute from the list of current charges to my account? 

OK - back to the dispute.  Once entering the transaction details, the next form asked me about how the retailer attempted to resolve the situation.  This question coming before asking for information on why I wasn’t satisfied with my purchase—that question came next.

Silly!  If you’re asking your customers to “tell you a story” of why this purchase has soured, don’t ask for how the story ends before asking why the conflict happened to begin with.  I ended up having to fill in these parts of the form twice because the interaction flow was flawed.

So having completed the dispute process on the website, I’m told I’ll receive a decision via postal mail.  The envelope came yesterday.  No decision here, nope!  According to the letter “In order to assist you further, we will need you to provide us with additional information” including:

- A statement that I’ve contacted the merchant and was refused a credit (already posted in the web site dispute process detailed above)

- Details of how the product was described and how it differed from what I received (already posted in the process above).  Oh,  and “how the download was completed”.  That should be fun to explain…;)

- Explain whether the return or refund policy was explained at time of sale (Not entered on the website, but could have easily been).

- The exact date I returned the merchandise (I haven’t returned the merchandise, that’s why we’re all here talking).

Oh - and I have to give the merchant name, disputed dollar amount, and my account number (entered above, and also printed on the letter itself!)

Silly!

So is this process broken because of incompetent programmers and big business red-tape, or is it purposely filled with silly-hoops in order to weed out the majority of disputes—which would save the credit card company time and money?

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1. Boyink on August 24, 2004

   An update:

   I got another letter from the credit card company—asking for more clarification about how the software vendor “cancelled the download”.  So I called the person who sent the letter.  Of course before I could be put through I had to give my account number, birthdate, and last 4 digits of my SS#.

   I had to explain, a couple of times, how it’s kinda hard for a vendor to “cancel a download”.  They really didn’t seem to get how simple this was - I paid for and downloaded some software, didn’t like it, and wanted my money back.

   Then she wanted me to have a phone conference with the vendor to have them walk me through how to delete the files from my system.  I know how to do that, I said, but we all know there’s no way to verify that I actually did.

   Then she asked me more questions that they should know the answers too - like when the charge appeared on my account.  Hello?  You’re the credit card company.

   I finally told the gal that I had told her everything possible about the transaction.  There just wasn’t anymore data they could dig out by asking any more questions.

   I’m also done spending time on the issue - for a $50 purchase it just isn’t worth spending hours on.

   So I guess writing crappy software can still pay off, if you make it too much trouble to get any refunds….

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