Speculation, Fact and Fiction

Anyone phoning me today is going to get a very terse response. Until I calm down a bit. I'm trying to resolve an erroneous charge on my credit card. Because back in December, my ISP charged me for a service that I have cancelled. Along with the service I do want.

OK, their screw-up, these things happen. When I rang back in December, they were very apologetic and promised to refund the charge promptly. Um. That didn't happen, for some reason, presumably with Christmas... I rang to point this out. They're even more apologetic and assure me the refund's in hand.

Now we get to dealing with Barclaycard and their call centre staff. I initially wanted to tell them to flag that particular charge so I wouldn't get charged interest while we waited for the refund to come through. Now I just want to know that the refund's been processed.

I'm guessing from the accents that this call centre's in India or somewhere similar. And going by three utterly infuriating calls I've had to make so far, the staff there simply do not have the English language skills necessary to deal with anything beyond the most simple queries that stick to whatever script they've been given.

I've dealt with Indian call centres before, notably for Dell and Linksys customer support and had really excellent service to help resolve not-at-all-straightforward queries. I have no idea where the ISPs customer service centre really is or what the ethnicity of the staff may be. What matters is they understand what I'm saying to them.

But these three calls to Barclaycard have had me dealing with people who are clearly struggling to understand what I'm saying. In my very clearest English girls' grammar school Received Pronounciation. I have been calm and repeated the details several times and asked if they understand. Oh, yes, they say. But they clearly don't. You can hear it in their tone. All of which is confirmed by the letter I've received today which doesn't even refer to the correct charge.

I'm trying to decide whether to bother writing to their customer service address in Northants, or to wait for next month's statement and see where we are then, or whether to just cancel the damn card completely.