February 9th, 2009 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

Due to a couple of things that were out of my control I had urgent need to contact PayPal over the weekend. The short story is that a merchant had sent my affiliate payment to a wrong e-mail address and that PayPal wouldn’t let me add that address to my account and get my money, just under £900 of it! I was a little annoyed. On trying to add the address and it failing it then became a matter of urgency that I had somebody look into it. I had no idea who was in control of that PayPal account. So I decided to phone PayPal, and this is where the fun started…

To start with I dialled the 08707 307 191 number that is given for UK support. This is an expensive phone line so the last thing I wanted was a convoluted telephone system, what exactly did I get? The most convoluted telephone system that I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. I found myself shouting at my phone like an idiot trying to work my way through the maze and ACTUALLY GET TO SPEAK TO A HUMAN. I gave up. It was late at night.

My next move was to send an e-mail instead, in the hope that they phone me, after all they must have my phone number on record for a reason right? Wrong. I did get a reply the next day. Unfortunately due to “technical reasons” they are not allowed to phone customers. Yes you heard that right. PayPal customer service is not allowed to save their customers expense by phoning them. If that’s not annoying enough I was directed to phone the general 08707 307 191 number again. At which point if I did get to speak to a person the chances of it being the person who had replied to my e-mail would be slim to none and I’d be left to explain the whole situation again.

So cooled down from a good night’s sleep I phoned again. 10 minutes later I gave up again. By now I had accumulated over 15 e-mails from PayPal because every option you select seems to result in them sending you another e-mail. I was really pissed! I’ll let you see how much all this cost me when I get the phone bill but enough to say that the red mist was firmly in place. I was still to speak to a real human at PayPal.

This was where I snapped. I phoned back again, went through the security check and instead of waiting for the blurb menus and anything else. I shouted “Security” then “Agent” down the line continuously like a petulant 7 year old demanding sweets. After doing this 3-4 times the phone started to ring. It only worked! I was then put through to somebody who, to be fair, was actually very helpful. Within 2 minutes we had the problem sorted and that e-mail could then be associated with my account and I could get my money. It literally only took 2 minutes once I got to speak to somebody!

So this is my question for PayPal, other than the obvious “making money” reason why do you insist on putting us through that shitty phone system? WHY? Why not just give us a short keypad selection of departments and then put us straight through to somebody? If I wanted my balance or to change my details I can do that online. Chances are that if somebody is phoning that rip-off number it’s because there is something that needs urgently looking at.

And here we come to the real crux of the problem. When turning red with rage I had time enough to contemplate what my next action would be, or at least threaten to be. And the truth was that I/we need PayPal. It’s not like I could just close my account and go elsewhere, because to be frank there’s just not that viable an “elsewhere”. We are stuck with using PayPal and that’s why they can get away with a fee structure that makes most banks look reasonable and with a customer support system that would last about a day in any other industry. But I do have a tip for you, if you do ever need to speak to a human at PayPal then the secret is to phone up, go through security, say” security” and then keep on repeating “agent” down the line. I find shouting helps. It’s the only way that worked for me.

What about you, does anybody have any tricks for cutting through the PayPal red tape?

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