Paypal.com.au Fail

Here I am, using a blog for what God intended - to complain publicly about a service provider.

A friend suggested that I use Paypal as a reliable means to transfer money to him overseas from Australia.

I got my Paypal.com.au account linked to my bank account and verified. This took a few days. I had to wait for Paypal to make two small deposits in my account, and then enter them in Paypal.

Once I did that, I logged in to Paypal.com.au to transfer the money. There were two options - one that used Direct Debit, and one that used "Top up" through bank transfer.

Being used to doing bank transfers online, I chose that option. Paypal then gave me the details for the BSB and account that I was transferring into. I thought at the time that perhaps they had a unique generated account number per transaction, or per customer. I did the transfer, and waited for the 3-5 business days for the money to show up in Paypal.

Seven days later, still no sign of the money.

I rang Paypal this morning, and after navigating their painful phone menu, spoke to someone in what sounded like a Philippine call center. He took some details from me, and told me that it was a known issue and that many other people were having it. He told me that he would add my details to a queue, and that they would find my money.

I rang back this afternoon to ask how often I would be updated on the situation. I spoke to a different person, who asked me for more details, and told me that it was a developing situation, and that the call center workers were getting changing instructions on what information to get from customers to enable their funds to be found.

She told me that insufficient details had in fact been captured in the earlier call for a search to be made (lucky I called back!), and sent me an email with a list of details to give her.

I replied to her email with the details she requested, and immediately received an automated reply saying: "Sorry, we can't reply to emails sent through this address. Try calling us."

Later in the day I called back again, to see if they had in fact received the email. The third person I spoke to in the call center tried to reset the conversation, asking me: "When did you transfer the money?"

I told him that I had spoken to two people already about this. He checked into my account and told me that he could see the details I had sent, but the crucial piece was missing - the "Customer Reference ID". In filling out the details requested in the email, referring to the record in my bank's online transaction receipt, I couldn't find anything that matched this.

Thinking back to last week when I did the transfer, I remember thinking this was my receipt number from Paypal for the transaction. No, in fact Paypal's "Customer Reference ID" is the number that I was supposed to enter into the "To account description" field in my bank transfer.

I figured this out after some time on the phone with the third guy, and he insisted that it was my fault because I had not entered the code in the bank transfer.

Sorry, major interface failure - and the fact that it's not just me (a pretty savvy person with computer systems) bears that out. The "Top Up" transfer feature has been disabled because they have been having some "technical difficulties" with it.

Those are not technical difficulties, that's a design fault.

Blaming users for being too stupid to understand a poorly labelled interface and poorly documented procedure is a design failure (in fact, in this case the labelling of the fields is the procedure documentation).

The inability to explain the problem to customers who ring up for resolution is another problem. What the call center workers need to say is: "You didn't get your Top Up? OK, please tell me the date, the account you sent it from, and the 'To account description'"

If I hadn't rung back three times and continued to press the call center workers, they would not have collected the necessary details from me. I'm still not confident that they have everything they need correctly logged. We'll see.

I understand that the guys in the call center are just doing a job, and that they are part of a low-cost off-shore outsourcing operation that is paid to read scripts to people, not adaptively solve problems.

I worked for Red Hat for two years in technical support, alongside colleagues who came from just such a center in the Philippines when Red Hat brought phone support back in house and started to build an agile knowledge organisation. The smartest guys got hired by Red Hat, and the script monkeys got left behind.

It's exactly this inability to solve complex problems that is the weakness of the model that Paypal.com.au are using. Those people are not being paid enough to care about customers, and the system is set up to work well when the situation is well defined and all the customer needs is for someone to read the FAQ to them.

It was probably thrown into stark contrast because I spent another significant portion of my day today talking to an American Express travel agent, who put together a last minute complex travel and accommodation plan for me, taking me across the US and to Europe over the next three weeks. I called her three times today, gave her complex and changing requirements, and got extremely coherent advice and, after several iterations, a complex solution. She even stayed back 45 minutes after her shift ended to book my tickets, as today is the last day they can be booked.

Well, I don't mind the service when Paypal is just charging me cents - you get what you pay for. The problem is that right now, I'm not getting what I paid for, and it's more than a few cents!

Something to do with kirtan? The Paypal money is to bring Vaiyasaki to Australia in November. The trip to the US takes me to the 24 hour kirtan at New Vrndavan in the weekend before a series of business meetings on the East Coast. I couldn't think of a better way to prepare. :-)