In the midst of website server moves, I needed to put in an order for credits for tax returns/electronic filing that will be used during tax filing season next year in ProConnect Tax online.
If you order these return “credits” prior to the end of the year, you can realise a significant saving on the per-return price so I’m definitely motivated to order the number of personal and business returns I know I’m going to prepare once the new year arrives.
Normally this is a pretty painless process through the portal but for some reason, the website spat out a red message indicating that there was a problem and that I should try submitting the order again.
Like an idiot, I actually did so thinking the website ought to know the way to mend the problem better than I did if it had a message to indicate their desired course of action.
When I checked the “Purchases” section of the site, I was horrified to see that the order had been duplicated. Sadly, even though I could see the duplicated order, it didn’t give me an option to modify or cancel it through the portal without having to bother with “customer service”.
Fortunately, the order isn’t charged until January 2025 so I figured we’d have plenty of time for Intuit to sort it out and kill one of the orders.
As it was very early on the West Coast, I figured I’d try to get it sorted via chat.
What an utter mistake that turned out to be.
It started off innocently enough and I’m guessing this is a common enough situation that “Vanessa R” had a canned response that came back almost immediately with a link to submit a ticket to their billing department.
Sadly, there apparently isn’t any faster way to fix this other than submit a ticket and hope for the best (I never did receive the promised confirmation that the ticket had been submitted so I’m not particularly confident that it was actually submitted).
The kicker is that you have to wait 5-7 business days for them to address the problem.
That seems more than a little absurd in a day and age where the system should already be capable of recognising a duplicate order and suspending the duplicate until you can make contact with the customer to ask them if they truly wanted the duplicate or if it should be canceled.
Mind you, a CANCEL ORDER feature would seem to be very handy in the portal itself and then we’d not need “customer service” or support tickets or having to wait about for the simplest of fixes.
I can’t say that I was particularly impressed with Vanessa who came off as alternately snotty and condescending.
When I have to point out to her dealing with someone that has 30+ years in IT isn’t the time to have a wee on the customer’s shoes and tell them it’s raining, you’re royally screwing up the “customer service” aspect of the job.
I swear “customer service” is going to kill me well before cancer or some other malady! 🙁