My wife got a replacement credit card recently and was just about to cut up her old one when she realised the numbers were different. She called Nat West and was told that she had been moved to the new global Mastercard, which had lots of benefits. Apparently, she had been sent a letter telling her to opt-out if she didn’t want to move but hadn’t responded, so she’d been moved (this sort of high-handed behaviour from banks is also worthy of a blog but that will wait for another day!).
She told them “I don’t want a new card, I’ve had my old number for over 25 years, I know it off by heart and I want to keep it.”
“But the new card’s got lots of extra benefits”, they said.
“I don’t want any extra benefits, I just want my old number. I never asked you to change it, so please give it back to me”, she pleaded.
They said “We can’t do that”, so she asked to speak to a Supervisor.
The Supervisor said “We can’t do that”.
So she spoke to the person in charge of scheme, who explained “We’ve moved you onto the new system for global cards now, and it doesn’t allow us to move you back”.
“But I’ve been a loyal customer for over 25 years, I’ve spent fortunes with this card. If I can’t keep the number, I’ll go somewhere else and you will lose my business completely” my wife pointed out. They were unmoved, “There’s ‘no way’ we can move you back now” they said. Finally.
Was there really ‘no way’? If so, it’s a major design error in the system. Or was it that they don’t want to move her back to what is now a legacy system? In which case it’s a poor (and dishonest) process.
Either way, it’s a big failure of service by Nat West because they are exposing (and hiding behind) the inadequacies of their internal systems and structures to their customers.
This is always an automatic #fail. Never, ever start telling me, the customer, how you are set up internally because I DON’T CARE! It’s not my problem. I don’t want to know. I just want you to do what I ask, and I don’t want your excuses.
You won’t be surprised that my wife, a loyal and long-standing of theirs, told them what to do with their global card. And all its benefits.
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