All right! This chick is TOAST!
–Dr. Peter Venkman, “Ghostbusters”

Comenity (aka Bread FInancial) can join the ranks of places that can suck me.
Yeah, really starting strong out the gate with that one aren’t I? Well, not without good reason. Stephanie and I got new iPhones this week, and last night I helped her get things set up in Apple Wallet. She hadn’t really used it before, so nothing transferred from the old phone. No problem, this is pretty painless – especially with the NFC reader in the phone that can literally grab all the card data out of thin air. We set up one card which asked for a 6-digit code to be SMS’d, no problem. Then we came to my PlayStation Visa card. Her card doesn’t have a tap-to-pay feature so the data had to be entered by hand. No problem, that’s easy enough to do and we did. Then it came to the verify stage, and the only option was to call them. Well, neither one of us felt like talking to someone, but OK fine we’ll do that.
Stephanie was answering the questions at first which was fine, but as soon as I spoke the agent got really shitty all of a sudden. I said I’m the primary account holder, my wife is the authorized user, and we’re trying to set this up on her phone. Continuing with his snippiness he asked a few other questions, and then finally said he would have to verify me to continue. No problem. He said can we use the number on file as (last four digits of my phone number) and I said that would be fine, I just did that a couple weeks ago when logging in. Quite a bit of time passed, and then he came back and said that he couldn’t verify using that phone number, so he would be unable to continue. I said that’s unfortunate, and was just about to ask what do I have to do next to verify things, when he let out the more interesting part.
“Further, that means we have to place a hold on the account until it’s been reviewed.”
The fuck? He went on to explain that because my phone couldn’t be used to verify things, he had to put a hold on the whole damned card – not just hers, but mine as well, the one that has a bunch of monthly bills go to all the time because why not that’s how I’ll rack up PlayStation points I can redeem for gift cards and get free games or even just pay for PlayStation Plus for a year. I asked what do we have to do about this and he said there’s nothing he could do. So I said something I rarely do: “Then you’re going to march your way up the chain of command until you find someone who can do something, because this needs to be fixed immediately. Don’t worry about the time, I can wait.”
A few minutes later and after a few times of “sorry about the wait”, he hung up on me.
I got the number off the back of my card – which is different than the iPhone told me to call, understandably so one is for customer service and one is probably specialized for activations – and called Comenity directly. Interestingly, when their system answered, it asked for the last four digits of my SSN, and then knew who I was without asking for my card number. So apparently they DO know who I am based on my phone number, don’t they… anyway, a nice gentleman answered and heard me out, understood what the problem was, but also said he couldn’t help directly but that he could transfer me to the account security office or something like that, and they might be able to give some more information. He then proceeded to hang up on me instead of transfer my call.
Ok, now I’m fucking pissed.
I sat and stewed for a bit, and took some time to look through Google Voice settings; specifically, there used to be a blanket setting in GV for incoming calls from people not in your contacts list. At some point that got removed, so I was not sure how I would set things so that I would get phone calls from people not in my contacts. After some more experimentation it seems that the answer is to use the setting in the phone itself now – turning it on there means nobody outside my contacts will ring the phone and the calls will go to Google voicemail, and turning it off makes the phone ring and I can answer or dump the same as I would before. This is fine, just wasn’t expected since I didn’t know things moved around, but now that I know I’m OK with it. But I noticed something else while looking through these settings – that first agent, the one who tried to verify my phone and said he couldn’t, did so by having the system MAKE A PHONE CALL TO TALK TO ME. That was never stated ANYWHERE that it was going to make a call. If it was, I’d have said you’ll have to wait a moment because things are configured that my phone will not ring right now, and I may have even said let’s deal with this tomorrow instead. I assumed, and perhaps that’s a bad thing but I think it was a safe assumption to make, that “verifying your phone number” meant they were going to send me a six-digit number in an SMS and I’d read it off to him. I’d even joked with Stephanie that this guy was being a bit of a prick or else I’d point out that I shouldn’t give that number to anyone, that’s how phishing works, but he probably wouldn’t get it.
So now I know that the first asshole was so incompetent as to not actually tell me what the process was for verification, but then to “fail” me for not doing something I had no idea I had to do because he didn’t tell me. And, Comenity’s phone system sucks because I got hung up on twice now. Three times, actually, because after taking some time to collect my thoughts and discover this information, I called back and this time the automated system said it was routing me to whatever department that was immediately. I found this amusing a little, because it’s as if they already know “this person doesn’t want to talk to the initial CSRs, get them right to the point.” I stopped being amused, however, when after it said I would be transferred I again got hung up on.
My fourth call also got routed right to the department I wanted to talk to, and this time a nice woman answered and took down all my information. Unfortunately she also claimed to have no control over it, but that the department would look over things and there would be an answer in “three to five days” (later confirmed to be business days). So if you’re keeping score, this means some idiot who got pissy that there was more than one person on a phone call then screwed up and didn’t tell me how exactly he was going to verify my account (nevermind if I was calling from my phone, that wouldn’t have worked either), then locked my account and hung up on me, and has basically shut me out of all of my automatic payments and billings for up to a week.
Suddenly, the fact that I can get PSN gift cards for free games isn’t worthwhile to me anymore. Time to take my money elsewhere.
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