Complete Incompetence at HSBC and I'm steaming mad : (
And sound off I shall!
Just over a week ago I was luck to find myself traveling southwestern British Columbia. I was working a dealer show and then chasing fish with customers for a couple days. Sounded pretty good to me . . .
so on the 13th I hit a local Bank's ATM and get a message that states "requested amount exceeds available funds." Wow, that is a problem. Especially because it was 100% untrue and I knew that for sure. So here I am, thousands of miles from home with ZERO dollars. Not good. So I call the HSBC Commercial Banking hotline and explain the situation. It was then that I should have put on my new William Joseph waders as the "you know what" began to get deep.
I was told that the security/fraud department must have rejected the transactions because I was traveling. Well that excuse didn?t fly since I?m ALWAYS TRAVELING. Lower 48, Alaska, England, Norway, Denmark, Singapore, the Philippines and so on, that?s where I use the card and is has worked fine until now. IF they had looked at my usage history they would have seen that.
I was then put on hold and the customer service rep said that the reason I was not able to get a cash advance was that I was not authorized to do so on this account. I had to laugh out loud at that one. Since the day I got this card, 95% of the many transactions have been . . . yup you guessed it . . . CASH ADVANCES! So, that excuse held no water.
Then after being put on hold again I told that sorry, the real reason is the snow storm in western NY. Ah yes, let?s just keep throwing excuses out there until something sticks to the wall! Brilliant!
So, for the next few days I had to resort to other means to get cash, mainly taking $ out of my personal accounts. Not pleased with that!
Then this week I tried again and once again, the transactions would not go through. Despite calls to customer service by me and our Accounting department no progress was made. We were told that it was not an HSBC problem and that was that. It was an error on the part of the locations where the card was being used. Yeah, right. All those banks were screwed up and HSBC was completely innocent. Simply amazing that a company would take such a holier than thou stance when it was very clear that their system had an error of some sort.
Then came today's antics. Once again I tried to withdrawal money and got the same error message. So I called HSBC customer service again and asked for a supervisor. After explaining everything the grey matte challenged supervisor declared that their system was running fine and that this difficulty had NOTHING to do with HSBC. The guy even called me a liar as he doubted that I tried the card at multiple locations! Yikes, this is getting uglier. I then asked the following . . .
IF I walk up to an ATM machine and can withdrawal cash on my ATM card (not with HSBC thank god) and I can put in a personal credit card and withdrawal cash why then when I put my HSBC card in that same machine does it give me this ?funds not available? message. Silence on his end although I could hear the back-peddling. He had no answer for that other than there was absolutely NOTHING WRONG with HSBC and this was not their error. I felt like I was beating my head against the wall and talking to my Chocolate Lab but then I figured that even my Lab could noodle through this one. So when we hung up he was still adamant that HSBC was not at fault. I had a feeling that if I had handed him a blue cup and told him it was blue he would have sworn it absolutely was NOT blue and was indeed white or red. Steam was coming from my ears.
I then went to my local HSBC location and tried to get a cash advance and was told it would not go through. Bingo I said! For the next 30 minutes the local business teller did everything she could to help me. She was the only one at HSBC who appeared to have a functioning brain. After telling here what had transpired she called corporate and then was welcomed into my 7th circle of hell. She could not believe just how difficult it was trying to deal with them and then understood why I was feeling as I was. While she was on the phone with HSBC corporate they said everything was fine and I could use my card. So while she had corporate on the phone I used their ATM machine and yup, you guessed it, I got that same error message.
This has now been dragging on for 11 days and our cards still don?t allow cash advances. HSBC is 100% without a clue. Nothing is closer to being solved. At least as of this afternoon they are now admitting that ?there could be some issue on their end. Wow now that was a major admission on their part.
So the whole point of this rant is simply to prove the complete incompetence of some these days and the total lack of ability to think a reason by management at companies like HSBC. What the heck ever happened to good old fashion customer service where the company actually cares about their customer instead of looking upon them as an annoyance?
With any luck, the less than intelligent folks at HSBC corporate will stumble upon a solution to what is not their problem and fix it. I will however not hold my breath. I can tell you that I will never use the HSBC credit card again and will recommend that friends and business associates do the same.
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