jayeff

How many years have you been promising better first line support (ie telephone and email)?

Skip past the question of whether the first card was ever sent. When the replacement, ordered on August 1st, still wasn't in your office by August 10th (and since cards are produced twice a week), that should have struck someone as worth following up on. But no-one did. Not until I pressed again five days later, did anyone actually check and discovered there was indeed a problem.

Then what happened? Michael/Keyser stuck his neck out to get my overdue (3rd-attempt) card overnighted. Not only was it not sent on the day originally promised, but I believe he trusted what he was telling me when he wrote on Tuesday at 3:25pm that it had been sent that day. But the fact is that a pickup wasn't even requested until 10:25pm, so it wasn't collected until 3:50pm the next day. Apparently someone gave him misleading information which did nothing for his credibility or yours.

Thursday the card arrives. Attempting to validate it, your bad, mine or a combination, I'm not 100% sure, but anyway it gets blocked. So I call to have it unblocked. Done: "check back in 30 minutes to reset the PIN". Actually I left it an hour: "There was an error setting your PIN. Please try again later". I tried every hour until 9:30pm when I called support.

The woman/girl refused to believe there even could be a problem at your end. She totally ignored that I had tried from two PC's, restarted them, cleared my cache, tried in two different browsers. "There is nothing we can do". When pressed, she suggested that I call the number on the back of the card and like an idiot I fell for that, without recognizing the number. Guess who answered? EPassporte Customer Service. It would be funny if it were not so aggravating.

By this time I have emails in to support and Keyser. No answer from either by the next morning, so I try the telephone again. Different person, same response, except this time he opened a job number.

At 3:30pm I get an email from Keyser telling me the problem is solved and I can now set my PIN. So finally, late on August 25th, I had a working replacement card for the one which expired on July 31st.

But the story doesn't end there. A while later I get a response from customer service to the email I had sent at 10:30pm the previous evening: "we do not have any system issues and the only optioni we have is to open a ticket"...

You may even be right about some of the people who post in negative threads having an agenda. But that totally ignores all the people who have long been reporting genuine problems with your telephone and email support. And while everyone appreciates the help KK, Rand and now Keyser provide, I'm sure it does nothing for anyone's sense of security that these people seem to be the only ones who can cut through your regular support's templated responses and actually get anything done.

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PS: on the day the card arrived, I couldn't get it unblocked until late afternoon, because until then I couldn't access a computer and there was no way to anticipate and answer questions such as "what was the last amount paid into your account?". Surely, since banks, credit card companies and the rest have perfectly sound security measures - passwords, specific security questions, etc - and knowing them, customers can memorize or note the answers, EP could use similar measures? It is hard to believe their methods are any less secure than yours, and they are certainly easier to work with.