My family met for the weekend in Melbourne on the 19th/20th Jan and I treated my mother to business class flights there and back (hey, seeing as her points/sc's family pool to mine... it was a nice earner as well as a nice gift for her!). I've since spent a lot of time sending emails to velocity, messages to the facebook team and on the phone to velocity (mostly on hold.....) trying to get everything to credit. It wouldn't autocredit on the website - one flight had 'missing information' when everything was filled out, the other flight indicated she hadn't boarded it.... which meant that I talked to myself the entire flight (altogether possible...).
It looks like the facebook team managed to get someone to do mine manually but there was no action regarding my mother's points. The facebook team could only say that there was a delay with points and that they couldn't escalate it until next week... I appreciated the timely responses from the social media team but what really annoyed me was the utter lack of response after weeks from Velocity regarding this query (sent to retro@ 2 weeks ago) and another one regarding another question I had (sent to another email address about 3 weeks ago).
I got very frustrated this morning with a call centre operator as he insisted that he couldn't even accept the account number from me without speaking to my mother first to verify her identity. When I told him that my mother doesn't know her membership number but that I could give it to him before putting her on the phone, he wouldn't take those details without speaking to her first.
My mother didn't have her glasses so couldn't read the number I had on the computer screen and would have just had to hand the phone back to me as soon as he asked his first question (eg. the account number). According to his logic, he still wouldn't have been able to speak to me. After going around in circles for a couple of minutes and getting annoyed that he just wouldn't take the number, I ended up just brusquely asking to speak to a supervisor... even having to cut the operator off as he repeated the same thing multiple times until he acquiesced and transferred me.
The supervisor said that he was of course able to take those details first and everything went smoothly after that with regards to verification and explanation of the problem. He said they would manually credit before the end of the day. I came here immediately ( somewhat frustrated
) to share this and, while I was typing, the supervisor called me back to advise that he'd credited the account, pooled them to me and upgraded my status to SG as I had reached the required balance. He just wanted to check that everything showed properly on the system for me (which it did). I let him know how grateful I was.
So from extremely unimpressed to quite impressed (albeit somewhat grudgingly - my stubborn side
). I just wish it had been that easy (or automatic!) from the get go.
Now to wait and see how the system shakes out in order to see how SG/WP compare as to whether I work to the next level or sit pretty
