I'm normally a big fan of NIB, but they really let us down badly in this case. [broken link removed] had her purse whipped out of her handbag which was hanging on the baby’s buggy a couple of weeks ago. This happened in Next in new Dundrum Town Centre, on the Weds afternoon. [We've since heard of quite a few other people who were robbed in the same way]. We were flying out to Italy on holidays on Saturday morning, so we had all the fun of cancelling & replacing cards urgently. My experiences with Amex (via BOI card services) and NIB (for my NIB Visa card) were remarkably different.
Amex cancelled the card immediately. As they use different account numbers for each cardholder, the full account did not have to be cancelled. This meant I didn’t have to worry about resetting the direct debits. When I explained our circumstance about the holiday, they arranged to pull the replacement card out of the next day’s batch and have it ready for collection from their Nassau St office in Dublin. SWMBO had the replacement card in her hands the next afternoon, less than 24 hours after it had been reported. When I disputed one (surprisingly small €13-odd) transaction which hit the account that afternoon, Amex said they would just write it off, as it wasn’t worth the cost of investigation.
NIB cancelled the card immediately, but I was disappointed to find that I couldn’t cancel the Visa & ATM cards at the same time – no joined-up thinking there! When I explained our predicament about the holiday, they said I could call Visa International who would arrange an emergency replacement card. They gave me a freefone number 1800-558002 for Visa international, but unfortunately this number doesn’t accept calls from mobile numbers – not much use for emergencies then. When I got back to my landline and called Visa, they went through a pile of verification checks, and then explained that they would need to get authorisation from NIB for the emergency card. However, NIB (via their UK owners Northern Bank) only provide this authorisation service on a M-F 9-5 basis (not much use for emergencies then), so we lost another 14 hours or so waiting for the guys in Northern Bank to come into their Leeds office.
Then came the real frustration – I rang Northern Bank in Leeds first thing on Thursday to ensure they were moving ahead with the authorisation, so they said they would get it moving straight away. I called them back about 40 minutes later to confirm that everything was OK, and they told me they were waiting for some fax from Visa International. I then called back to Visa International, who told me that they were waiting for Northern Bank. I actually had to conference the two guys together on the same line – Carlos from Visa International in Canada & Helen from Northern Bank in Leeds - to get to the truth. It turned out that (once again), the delay was on the NIB side. So they did their thing after an hour or so, and Visa International got the approval they needed to produce a single emergency card only – NIB refused to authorise emergency cards for both myself & herself for ‘policy reasons’ (no better explanation was forthcoming).
Carlos from Visa International called me back to explain that they would send the emergency card by next-day courier service, so we should get them in our hands on Friday. And true to their word, the replacement card arrived on Friday afternoon, after a minor panic with UPS. I rang UPS that morning and was told that the package was ‘out for delivery’ and I should get it by 2 pm. I was checking the package status via their track-and-trace website and got a huge shock to see it marked as ‘unable to deliver’. When I called UPS, I was told that they only had a house number & street name, no townland and no postcode, so they didn’t know where to deliver to. They said they would redeliver on Tuesday (Monday was a bank holiday), and I had to make quite a fuss to get them to find a better solution. Eventually, the agent came back on the phone and said ‘the driver is just outside your house now’ – and he was. But they had lied about the address – they had the correct postcode, so surely it’s not too much to expect a UPS driver to have an A-Z map.
I had another to-do with NIB on the Friday morning. The purse in question was found in a laneway in Ballyfermot and handed into the PTSB office there by a civic minded customer. All the cards were present & correct, though the Amex Blue card was folded in half for some reason. Only the cash (the grand total of about €9 she estimates) was missing. So I called NIB to get them to ‘uncancel’ the cards, given that I was nervous about whether the replacement emergency card would get to us on time and they were only giving us a single card instead of the two cards we normally use. Uncancelling the cards would also have avoided the need to change the 4 direct debits which hit that account. But no, despite the fact that recovering a lost/stolen card must be a very common scenario, there is no ‘uncancel’ option. One unhelpful and rather cheeky supervisor pretty much suggested that it was our fault for ‘losing’ the card in the first place and we should be grateful for what we were getting!
The icing on the cake of the NIB customer experience occurred on our return. The new NIB cards with the new account number were waiting for us when we got back. We got a rather strange letter from NIB during the week asking me to ring a certain dept. When I did this, they explained that they had reduced the credit limit down to €600 for the emergency card (which they hadn’t bothered to explain at the time) and they were now putting it back up to the original level. I’m not sure why they needed me to ring them about this, but anyway, I was reassured that the original credit limit would be restored. However, SWMBO was shopping on Friday and had the card declined. When she rang NIB, they said we were already over our limit – they hadn’t restored the original credit limit and were declining authorisations as a result. They did restore the limit at that point, but it just seemed all so avoidable and unnecessary.
So the key lessons learnt for NIB customer service should be;
Am I being too harsh on them?
Amex cancelled the card immediately. As they use different account numbers for each cardholder, the full account did not have to be cancelled. This meant I didn’t have to worry about resetting the direct debits. When I explained our circumstance about the holiday, they arranged to pull the replacement card out of the next day’s batch and have it ready for collection from their Nassau St office in Dublin. SWMBO had the replacement card in her hands the next afternoon, less than 24 hours after it had been reported. When I disputed one (surprisingly small €13-odd) transaction which hit the account that afternoon, Amex said they would just write it off, as it wasn’t worth the cost of investigation.
NIB cancelled the card immediately, but I was disappointed to find that I couldn’t cancel the Visa & ATM cards at the same time – no joined-up thinking there! When I explained our predicament about the holiday, they said I could call Visa International who would arrange an emergency replacement card. They gave me a freefone number 1800-558002 for Visa international, but unfortunately this number doesn’t accept calls from mobile numbers – not much use for emergencies then. When I got back to my landline and called Visa, they went through a pile of verification checks, and then explained that they would need to get authorisation from NIB for the emergency card. However, NIB (via their UK owners Northern Bank) only provide this authorisation service on a M-F 9-5 basis (not much use for emergencies then), so we lost another 14 hours or so waiting for the guys in Northern Bank to come into their Leeds office.
Then came the real frustration – I rang Northern Bank in Leeds first thing on Thursday to ensure they were moving ahead with the authorisation, so they said they would get it moving straight away. I called them back about 40 minutes later to confirm that everything was OK, and they told me they were waiting for some fax from Visa International. I then called back to Visa International, who told me that they were waiting for Northern Bank. I actually had to conference the two guys together on the same line – Carlos from Visa International in Canada & Helen from Northern Bank in Leeds - to get to the truth. It turned out that (once again), the delay was on the NIB side. So they did their thing after an hour or so, and Visa International got the approval they needed to produce a single emergency card only – NIB refused to authorise emergency cards for both myself & herself for ‘policy reasons’ (no better explanation was forthcoming).
Carlos from Visa International called me back to explain that they would send the emergency card by next-day courier service, so we should get them in our hands on Friday. And true to their word, the replacement card arrived on Friday afternoon, after a minor panic with UPS. I rang UPS that morning and was told that the package was ‘out for delivery’ and I should get it by 2 pm. I was checking the package status via their track-and-trace website and got a huge shock to see it marked as ‘unable to deliver’. When I called UPS, I was told that they only had a house number & street name, no townland and no postcode, so they didn’t know where to deliver to. They said they would redeliver on Tuesday (Monday was a bank holiday), and I had to make quite a fuss to get them to find a better solution. Eventually, the agent came back on the phone and said ‘the driver is just outside your house now’ – and he was. But they had lied about the address – they had the correct postcode, so surely it’s not too much to expect a UPS driver to have an A-Z map.
I had another to-do with NIB on the Friday morning. The purse in question was found in a laneway in Ballyfermot and handed into the PTSB office there by a civic minded customer. All the cards were present & correct, though the Amex Blue card was folded in half for some reason. Only the cash (the grand total of about €9 she estimates) was missing. So I called NIB to get them to ‘uncancel’ the cards, given that I was nervous about whether the replacement emergency card would get to us on time and they were only giving us a single card instead of the two cards we normally use. Uncancelling the cards would also have avoided the need to change the 4 direct debits which hit that account. But no, despite the fact that recovering a lost/stolen card must be a very common scenario, there is no ‘uncancel’ option. One unhelpful and rather cheeky supervisor pretty much suggested that it was our fault for ‘losing’ the card in the first place and we should be grateful for what we were getting!
The icing on the cake of the NIB customer experience occurred on our return. The new NIB cards with the new account number were waiting for us when we got back. We got a rather strange letter from NIB during the week asking me to ring a certain dept. When I did this, they explained that they had reduced the credit limit down to €600 for the emergency card (which they hadn’t bothered to explain at the time) and they were now putting it back up to the original level. I’m not sure why they needed me to ring them about this, but anyway, I was reassured that the original credit limit would be restored. However, SWMBO was shopping on Friday and had the card declined. When she rang NIB, they said we were already over our limit – they hadn’t restored the original credit limit and were declining authorisations as a result. They did restore the limit at that point, but it just seemed all so avoidable and unnecessary.
So the key lessons learnt for NIB customer service should be;
- Don’t lie to the customer and try to push blame onto other parties (Visa International in this case)
- Authorise the issue of 2 emergency cards in such circumstances instead of just 1?
- If you screw around with the credit limit, make sure you fix it yourselves
- Provide a capability to 'uncancel' a card which has been recovered or found
Am I being too harsh on them?
