Tale of a bad customer experience, episode II:

Can a bad customer experience with one brand affect another brand?

Holiday season; I excitedly went online to Expedia, found decent fares for my flight to Thailand and proceeded to the booking page. Everything went smoothly until I reached the confirmation page: instead of getting the much anticipated confirmation number, I received a sad “Sorry, we were unable to make your reservation” message. Ok, fair enough; I told myself that I must have had mistyped my bank details and decided to try again.

Following this slight disappointment, I went onto my online banking to make sure that a lack of provision on my account hadn’t been the reason of the failure. Once logged in, the view of my statement petrified me: I had actually been debited of the amount of the flight I was trying to book. I must have sworn harder than for my internet problem.   I had no booking but the money had gone.

Upon calling Expedia, I was immediately reassured and told to contact my bank, ask for a fax number and a representative’s name, so that Expedia could fax the bank a cancellation order. Basically, my money had flown out of my account to land into a mysterious buffer zone between my bank and Expedia, waiting to be authorised. What I did not know at the time, was that if the retailer doesn’t claim the money, (which was the case with Expedia as the booking had not gone through) the pending transaction would cancel out after a few days and the money would return onto my account.

What follows now is a joke of call centre support:

• Phoned up the ‘current account’ service of my bank for the fax number (20 minute wait)
• Told “in the wrong service department” and transferred to the ‘fraud division’
• Another friendly but unhelpful support person (another 20 minute wait) told me I still wasn’t in the right service and the operator told me “Sir, I’ll transfer you to online banking operations”.
• From then on, every 5 minutes, the lad would pause the increasingly annoying waiting tune to announce me that he was trying to jump the queue and connect me to somebody.
• Another 20 minutes of this comedy (I was 1 hour on the phone at this point), told that nobody seemed to be working anymore as no-one was picking up the phone. Out of curiosity, I asked him for the direct number of that department.
• Called direct and received the automated response “This service is no longer available. Please call xxx for online banking operations”. Guess what Gordon Ramsay would have said at that point.

After blaming loudly and angrily my bank’s internal communication system, I phoned up the new number, waited a tiny bit, got to talk to someone, got a name and fax number, call back Expedia and eventually got my money back three days later.

So what’s the morale of the story…? Did this epic experience affect my perception of Expedia? Yes, a little bit as I now fear the same issue to happen again. However, the bad online user experience was offset by a professional, quick and friendly service on the phone.

Did this affect my perception of the bank: yes a lot, as it felt like no-one on the phone knew what they were talking about (I actually forgave them the waiting time). The incompetence of a few ones completely discredited the seriousness of the bank. However, I went to my local branch on the following working day and had my distrust of the bank blown away by a professional and very capable clerk.

Hopefully for them, neither of these two brands relied on one channel only to convey their image. But this story really demonstrates is how a travel agency almost made my bank lose a customer.