Why does Paypal even bother with a call center?
I made a double authorisation with Southwest Airlines today. Their website kept telling to try again because of an undefined error. So I did until my fingers got really tired.
Of course I called their reservations line and had a shock. I made 9 reservations. 2 via Paypal. None was successful.
The staff at SWA was really nice. 15 minutes later, I was booked on my flight and ready to fly.
Then I realised one thing. Paypal deducted my money from the 2 transactions that did not go through and placed the transactions as pending.
The answer that the Paypal website gave to this question “Why is the order status pending?” was “The status of an order is pending until it expires, is completed or has been canceled.” Is that an answer?
I decided to call Paypal. They have this nice little “Call Us” button somewhere on their website which intelligently gave me a Singapore number.
I dialed that number. The machine picked up the call, gave me a warning that my call is being recorded for ‘training’ purposes before it kept me waiting for 20 minutes. Then a guy called “Kirk” or something picked up the call.
I told him my predicament. He said I have 2 options. One is to wait for the transaction to void itself after it expires in one month. The second one is to contact Southwest Airlines. What kind of an option is that? I waited 20 minutes for the a non answer!
I asked Kirk if he is sure that there are no other options. His reply was, “There are no other buttons that I can click here.” Okay, great. This guy is a genius!
I grilled him a few more times hoping against all hope that he could come up with a more helpful solution. I wonder why I even tried.
Not wanting to let Paypal earn any interest out of me, I decided to choose the second option. Since SWA mentioned that I should contact Paypal when I voiced this up while making my reservation, I figured SWA staff probably don’t know how Paypal really works. So I asked Kirk to give me a contact in SWA that can help. He told me to go to the website and check.
Seriously Paypal, I think I just found a way for you to cut cost. Close down your call center. It is crap.
