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Feb 11
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I’ve just been on the phone with PayPal trying to resolve a refund issue, apparently if I don’t have funds already in my account I’m not allowed to refund someone’s transaction (even though I have a valid credit card) unless I wait 7-10 days to setup bank funding. In the mean time my eBay customer will get fed up of waiting and leave me bad feedback – all because PayPal seem to be selective about when they choose to take credit cards.
So, to try and see if there’s a way around this I phoned up and verbally wrestle with their ridiculously complex speech recognition system until I got fed up and started saying “Agent” for every answer. After fighting my way through the machine world I eventually got to speak with one of their off-shored customer service reps whose language skills were so poor he had to ask me to speak slowly (I don’t have a strong accent at all) and he told me the reason it’s not possible is because the policy said that it’s not possible – the only useful suggestion he had was for me to find someone willing to give me £5.70 as a personal gift and I can refund from that.
On the guy’s 3rd of 4th repetition of the same policy script I told him that I’m looking to find a way around the problem and that I don’t want to get bad feedback because of their stupid policy. All of a sudden the line goes silent and the guy says “there’s no need to use profanity”, I re-stated what I said assuming he’d misheard me and he said “you’re not allowed to use that word”, I asked “what word? – ’stupid’?” and the guy says “yes” – it’s considered as profanity in PayPal’s world. I do want to stress that I was not aggressive towards the guy and I did not make any personal remarks about him – just their policy.
This just brought me to a climax of annoyance so I just asked to speak to a supervisor, I held for five minutes before the call was dropped and had to redial the customer services line, fight with their machine again and then hold for 15 minutes before getting to a supervisor. The supervisor was American so I didn’t have any language issues and but he kept running round the same argument which is roughly:
me: I want to issue a refund for a transaction.
him: You can’t do that because your account balance is zero.
me: But can’t you take the money from my credit card?
him: No, because you’d then be using borrowed money.
me: But when I make a payment for a purchase you let me use ‘borrowed money’.
him: That’s different because this is a refund.
me: But why is that different, I’m still taking money from a source and sending it on aren’t I?
him: Yes but in this case you’re paying borrowed money into your account.
me: But with a purchase the money still goes into (and then out of) my account.
him: Yes but this is different.
me: Why?
him: Because it’s a refund.
Repeat four or five times and that was pretty-much the conversation, he did apologise for the fact that I was hung-up on and at no point did he seem upset or offended when I called their policy stupid – maybe it’s a regional thing, or maybe he doesn’t hold ‘the policy’ as close to his heart as the other guy.
P.S. Does anyone feel like giving me £5.70 as a personal gift?