Woes of the Wizard Clear Advantage Mastercard

I applied for the Wizard Clear Advantage Mastercard, a retail financial product underwritten by GE Money, more than a month ago when a friend told me about it. What I liked was the lack of transaction charges for foreign purchases, very handy for making certain internet purchases like domain registrations.

I had applied for the card about the same time as another card, also underwritten by GE Money. The letters to confirm my identity came a few days later and I went to the nearest post office outlet to process both applications. That was the 9th of May. A few days later, I got my supermarket linked card. So far so good. I thought the Wizard card would arrive soon after.

I was wrong. A couple of weeks later, the expected mail still had not arrived. I called Wizard/GE Money up. The guy who picked my call sounded Indian. (I thought: "Oh great, here we go again. Yet another Indian call centre") I enquired quite politely about my application. After several long minutes on the phone, he finally located my application and brusquely said that it's been sitting around and he'll send it to the right department for processing that day. Again, I politely asked if there was any complications with the application. He said no, it just hadn't been processed yet (quite obviously!) but it will be processed by that day.

I was disgruntled but thought no more about it until another week had passed. Still no credit card. This time round, when I called, they insisted they couldn't find my application in the system and they could only check with the application ID. I dug up the documents and found this ID and called again. Apparently my application had been sent for processsing. Nothing was known about this status of the application and the customer service lady was about to put me on hold indefinitely to speak to a supervisor (and I was on a mobile phone!) and I wasn't about to suffer through that so asked instead for someone to call me back when they've checked. 3 days after and still no news.

So I called again. Finally, I got an Aussie voice, so I knew I haven't been redirected to an Indian call centre. Again, the same issue but this time round, I told Daryl, the guy I spoke to, that I wanted to speak to a manager who *could* tell me what was going on and that I wanted to file a complaint. I didn't scream or yell but I did ask quite firmly for a manager to speak to. He couldn't give me someone to speak to right away but promised that a manager would call me in about 10 minutes. (By the way, I didn't count the minutes since I had better things to do) but I did get a call shortly by a Lee (thought he said his name was Liam at first) telling me they were investigating and that they'd give me more information either by tonight or tomorrow morning. Lee did call me back again. He promised the welcome pack would be sent off today. He was apologetic over the whole fiasco and mentioned that he's filed a formal complaint on my behalf and would notify senior management. I haven't been happy over this entire affair, which had turned out to be not unlike the poor customer service experienced with the credit card division of Citibank, but Lee mollified me. At least GE Money has some good employees like Lee and Daryl working for them or you can be sure I'd never buy another product from them again.

I've been thinking....Should I be writing a letter of commendation for Lee? It wasn't outstanding service (which I've received from service reps of other companies before) but I was less angry after dealing with him. He'd done a good job by acknowledging my unhappiness with their screw up and had kept me informed as had been promised.