Complaint Review: GE Capital Cons Card Co. - Bellevue Washington

What seemed as a great deal on a set of tires, turned out to be the biggest headache and frustration ever! We paid for our tires through GE Capital Cons Card Co. ALL of our monthly installments were made on time. We try hard to pay bills on time. We are trying VERY hard to keep our excellent credit excellent! (We are newlyweds expecting to buy a home and start a family soon.)

But it looks like that may be challenging, no thanks to the incompetency of GE Capital customer service representatives. Here's what happened...

I wrote the check and mailed off our last payment on the tires on Nov. 4, 2003. The bill was due on the 8th. We live in Washington state, and know that any piece of ground mail en route to Kentucky WILL get there in three working days. (When mail is delivered.)

Soon thereafter, we moved, and our mail was not forwarded to us as it should have been. In January, the current tenants of our previous residence sent us a huge stack of mail. In it were two late payment notices from GE Capital stating that they did NOT receive our last payment on time, and that late charges were accruing. I called immediately upon receiving these, and spoke to a customer service representative.

I patiently explained our ordeal, that I had mailed the payment on time, and assumed that since that was the last payment, there was no need to leave them a forwarding address. However, the man did not seem to understand me. (I don't think English was his first language.) I continued explaining my predicament to him. We had moved and the people at our old house did not forward our mail to us until that day.

I asked the service rep. if GE Capital processed payments on the weekends. He stated, "Yes". "Ok", I continued, "then if the check was written and sent on the 4th and due on the 8th, then it should have arrived to you by the due date." The man only said that he did not know why it posted on the 10th.

My wife, feeling a bit frustrated by this time, asked to speak with him. So I handed the phone to her.

She spoke with the service rep. and reiterated our situation. She insisted that late charges be dropped completely, because we both felt strongly that we did not deserve to pay them.

To our relief (which was short-lived, unfortunately) the man told my wife that he would put a note on our account saying THAT HE WOULD DROP ALL LATE CHARGES, AND CLOSE OUR ACCOUNT WITH GE CAPITAL, per my wife's request. She even asked him to repeat himself one more time to verify if what she was hearing was correct. And he repeated back to her once more that our late charges were dropped, the balance on our account was $0.00, and he would close our account for us.

With the logical assumption that our account had been successfully closed and late charges dropped, we felt no need to worry about GE Capital...until the third week of February, when I received a rather rude phone call from a customer service rep. from GE Capital. He said that our late charges on our account had now tripled, and if we did not send an immediate payment, we would be reported to a collection agency. I was outraged!!

"How could this possibly be?" I asked. "We called last month about the late charges, spoke with a customer service rep. like yourself, and he specifically said that our balance was $0.00, and that he would close our account."

The service rep. said the records to show a balance of $82.95 on our OPEN, ACTIVE account. I told him that was ridiculous to expect us to pay all that money for a payment that I sent on time. The only reason it was processed late was by fault of GE Capital.

So I asked him to give me the name and contact information of his superior, so that I could write a letter to inform him/her of this situation. He said that he could not give out that kind of information, but that he would send me a form to fill out so that I could explain the situation, and request that our charges be dropped under the circumstances.

I thought, "Okay. I will explain this and it will be corrected."

Once again, GE Capital proved me wrong.

Do you know what I received in the mail a week later? It wasn't the form he promised to send me. Instead, it was a letter from GE Capital stating:

"Your payment on your card services...account has not been received. Please forward your payment immediately...be advised that your nonpayment of this debt is being reported on a regular basis to the credit reporting agencies, Experian, Equifax, and Trans Union..."

So, once again, I called to try to fix this. I called the 1-800 number on this form, and spoke to another customer service rep. for 45 minutes. I told him everything that had happened up until then. Also, he told me that GE Capital is NOT open on weekends, and therefore our payment would not have posted until the 10th. (A discrepancy. The rep. who told my wife that he would waive all late charges and close our account, had told me that their offices were open on weekends.) It was all in vain. He would not understand the circumstances, and so to avoid any further negative credit reports, and, pretty much, to just put an end to the nonsense that has dragged on over the course of three months, I paid the $82.95.

This does not seem right to me at all. Why should we be penalized for the mistakes of a few GE Capital employees? I understand that we are all human beings and we all make mistakes. Maybe someone dropped the ball and did not process our payment on time. Maybe that first customer rep. did not properly notate our account showing he had cleared our balance due to $0.00, and closed our account.

Whatever the reason, this does not give any human the right to lie or trick anyone else. Twice were we lied to. The first customer service rep. told us that they were open on weekends. The last one said the opposite. The rep. we spoke to in January said that he would mail us a form to explain our situation to a manager. That did not happen.

We feel tricked, and we feel that GE Capital showed us HORRIBLE customer service. Poor, unethical business ethic was displayed.

Ethically, we should have been given the benefit of the doubt SOLEY upon the knowledge that the first customer service rep. promised to waive late charges and close our account. No further questions.

But no. Not at GE Capital. They apparently do not listen to their customers. Or, they do not understand their customers.

We do not want anyone else to have to experience the worries and headaches we have.

We will certainly NEVER take our business to GE Capital again. We would never want a repeat of this pathetic excuse of service again. Frankly, there was no "service" involved. There was absolutely no "helping the customer", "satisfying the customer"

or "listening to the customer".

Instead, all we got on the other end of the phone were a few GE Capital representatives with closed ears and a limited English vocabulary.

Josh

Bellevue, Washington
U.S.A.

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