ASDA (Santander) Credit Card Stole My Money!

H.P.Bazxter

It's a bit long, but this, by far, the worst customer service experience by offshore call centres, and I work in an industry which deal with them on daily basis!

I have ASDA credit card in order to be qualified for the petrol discount. Always made repayment fully before the due dates, never made it late, once.

Yesterday, I have noticed via on-line banking that 2 payments of £93 taken from my Llyds TSB current acc, one was a manual transfer made by me to ASDA, an the other was a direct debit made to Santander. I cancelled the DD then as I did not recall setting this up.

I have more than 1 bank / CC acc which recently became Santander, so wasn't sure which one this money went to.

I logged onto ASDA CC online-banking and immediately was informed "Your acc was cancelled."
Phoned the customer service (offshore) and spent good 10 min to find out this was due to their site upgrading.

Then I asked if they took £93 out of my Lloyds acc. They said (!)
"We don't know where the money is coming from as DD was cancelled."

Then it took me further 15 min and 2 managers to find out that;
1. ASDA CC has decided to forcibly take FULL amount repayment each month via DD (mandatory to set this up when applying for their credit card, which I've forgotten about as never used,) regardless of customers making repayment himself or not.

2. This was informed by a letter 1 month ago (didn't reach me).

3. They would NOT refund for the DD payment fully if customer since used the CC. (In my case I used the card once since the last due date so they will only refund me £50.)

4. They still don't know where the money is coming from so the refund will be made into the bank acc that is informed by me by phone.

What?? I mean, what??

I hang up and filed Indemnity with Lloyds. I did not feel OK about giving ASDA my bank details so they can further screw this up.

The funny thing is, they say DD payment was made on 18/11/2010 when Lloyds record shows the payment left the acc on 23/11/2010. Maybe ASDA randomly set-up DD into all my bank acc??

If they didn't offer that discount I would have cancelled the card right this minutes!

Anyone experiencing the similar problem?

H.P.Bazxter

Now they gave me a statement dated on 24/12/2010, with the payment due date of 17/12/2010.
I am seriously considering to cancel the card now...

Wonkysplitdemon

Hi, I work for Santander Cards. The problems you have encountered are due to them migrating your account to a new "system". The call centre staff are completely powerless to resolve these issues much to our annoyance, we are relying on the I.T dept who designed the new system to put in a fix.. In the meantime, managers and staff are authorised to give redress at their discretion. Im sorry for the terrible experience but we really do not know much more than you at this point. The staff really do not know when the issues will be fixed, whilst this is certainly not an excuse, I hope it goes some way to explain the situation were facing.

my advice would be to call 0844 848 3478, speak to a UK associate and ask for some compensation.

TBC...

H.P.Bazxter

Thanks for your post, I am trying to be reasonable and I can sympathise with tech issues, I will try doing just that. I will, however, refuse to call their non-UK call centre ever again. They are 10 times worse than Tiscali help desk, and Tiscali help desk is worse than being useless, as it just causes frustration. They should at least inform their staff on general outage and on-going issues that are affecting mass of customers, instead having 1 or 2 managers / SV to deal with them all.

Wonkysplitdemon

The issues are common knowledge in the UK centres, i'd say 60% of the calls into the contact centres at present are as a result of problems relating to system issues and the agents understand the frustration and anger of our customers. With regards to the contact centre in Hyderabad, the indian staff are actually very good when they only have basic enquiries or tasks. When queries become more complex they have to deviate from their script and this is when it gets unbearable, I have to agree.