Two day’s later I receive a message from the store manager that they had accidently charged my credit card twice for the purchase.
He said that I needed to contact my credit card company and ask them to “dispute” the charge.
I experienced mixed thoughts. Why did they screw up? Glad that they noticed their mistake. Glad that they notified me. Why did they expect me to fix it? It was their mistake. Why didn’t they fix it?
Naturally I called him back.
During the short and apparently inconvenient conversation these statements from the store manager stuck with me.
“I don’t have time to talk about this now.”
“Finance emailed me and instructed me to call you to tell you to “dispute the charge with your credit card company.”
“One other customer also asked me why we don’t credit the extra charge and I don’t know.”
“I’m surprised that finance asked me to call you about the double charge. The company I worked with before simply waited for customers to notice the extra charge on their statement and expect the customer to dispute the over charge.”
Naturally, I responded to that last statement with, “Who did you work for before?”
His answer, “Rogers.”
I thanked him for notifying me of their error. I also pointed out that because it was their error I expected them to fix it by crediting my account. He claimed that he was unable to do that and repeated the instructions from “Finance” to dispute the charge. I pointed out that this would require time and effort from me to fix their mistake.
He was clearly out of his depth, ability and level of corporate trust.
I wondered, “How will this store manager ever learn about responsibility to customer service?”
He conveyed the message that he was doing me a favour by calling me and telling me what to do.
I called MasterCard and explained my strange request. The woman readily complied. I asked her if this was normal. “Wouldn’t it have made more sense for the seller to credit me for their mistake?” She agreed that “disputing” the charge required much more paperwork “but because this was Bell they would do it this way.”
Hmmm, I just signed a three year contract with Bell. I hope that I don’t regret it.
George Torok
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