And Standard Chartered strikes again!

DISCLAIMER: Once again, this is just my opinion. I am in no way trying to dissuade anyone from using Standard Chartered Bank.

Prior to cutting my card, I redeemed all of my rewards points. Well, duh, of course I would redeem those, since I earned that from all my use of the SCB card. You'd think I should get at least SOMETHING back for all those months of frustrated patience!

Anyway, I redeemed most of the points last August 16. It takes 6-8 weeks for the gift certificates to arrive from the time you call SCB. Okay, no problem.

On November 9 (August... September... October... November... 4 months!!! That's about 16 to 20 weeks), I called customer service, asking them where my GCs are. Lo and behold, they have no idea! It appears to be a problem with their marketing department as Marketing is in charge of the GCs, though customer service had forwarded my redemption to them as early as August 16!!!

As if their customer service wasn't bad enough, it appears their marketing team is extremely lacking as well (author muttering a string of foul curses while thinking of some eloquent but degrading words to describe this bad service... not poor service, ok, but really, really bad service). The worst part of it all is that NO ONE had the decency to inform me about any problems or delay with the order. I'm pretty sure my customer contact info is up-to-date, since I haven't changed any of my numbers since I got my gold card.

And they can't give the excuse that they're too busy, or there's not enough manpower to individually call their clients to inform them of such problems. Simply because they are running a service-based business. Or if you want to get technical about it, they've got those computer-generated letters all the time. What makes this instance different?

Anyway, since I still had a few points left, I redeemed the last few points for a measly Starbucks GC worth P100 (or was it P200)?

It's December 12 today, and I haven't received anything. Okay, 6-8 weeks isn't over yet, but what about my GCs from my August 16 redemption??? The customer service lady who took my call said she'd file a complaint in my behalf.

I scoffed at that. No one paid heed to my complaint last November 9... does filing a complaint with SCB actually mean anything at all to them? I think everything just gets deleted after the complaint gets sent. That's how lousy their service is. This is all just IMEHO, of course, but I think I have a pretty decent basis for saying so.

Oh, and on an additional note... their rewards redemption items suck! It's all GCs. You'd think they could provide a few items instead of just GCs.

The GC points conversion change often too, if you want to know. When I asked for an updated rewards list last April or may, the number of points I needed to get a Rustans GC was around 500 to 1000 points less than when I redeemed the GC in August.









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