Worst Customer Service award goes to...

HSBC Mastercard Customer “Service”.

Anybody who has grown up on a farm or in a farming community knows what ‘servicing’ means. HSBC Mastercard has taken the agricultural meaning and applied it to the phone support area of their business.

We have learned over the years that if you don’t let them know, then their security people will tag the out-of-country activity as "unusual activity on the card", or at least suspicious and suspend transactions until they can confirm the identity of the card user;  therefore we called HSBC to let them know that we would be out of the country for three weeks and that the credit card would be used far away from the areas that we would normally access their services: we even provided them with an itinerary of where we would be travelling when.

The 35 minutes on hold waiting for the less-than-competent customer ‘service’ agent was a GREAT start to the day as we had felt truly “serviced” for being kept on hold so long and the recording telling us we needed to go their website to resolve issues. When the agent finally did grace us with the honour of answering the phone, she had to be provided with the information – twice – then insisted that we provide her with an email address or cellphone number “in case there is unusual activity on the card”. The agent could not understand that we were calling HSBC to let them know SPECIFICALLY that there would be "unusual activity on the card" because the card would be in Europe, and not in Northern BC. A frustrating, circular, argument to say the least.

Our concept of a vacation is to leave everything electronic at home – no computer, no cell phone, not even digital music. We are taking a camera with two 32Gb memory cards, but that is the extend of anything with even a battery attached. I don’t even where a watch.

After explaining that we travel without communication devises, the agent still insisted on an email address that we were to check on a daily basis just in case HSBC has to get in touch with us because “… all you have to do is find an internet café in each city you are in …”.  I can only surmise that this agent has never taken a vacation or thinks taking a vacation means being tied to the internet.
We finally decided to risk it and head out on our vacation, untethered to electronic forms of communication despite the insistence of HSBC Customer “Servicing” Department.