In this day and age of the internet there is no need for customer service representatives, after all everything can be solved by an “avatar” online. We can connect 24/7 with AVA from Airasia or Red from Westpac and may I say both are completely useless.

Let’s start with Airasia, they told me a couple of weeks ago that my flight has been cancelled and so they have moved me to a later flight and if this is not suitable then I can get a refund, just have a chat with “Ava” on the website and all will be hunky dory. Well Ava had a few problems trying to understand for some reason and I was typing in English but I am in China behind the great firewall and I guess my VPN wasn’t doing a very good job. Anyway Ava took all my information eventually and I thought, marvellous. A few days later I have heard nothing and so I log into my account and the flight is still confirmed and not cancelled. I check with Ava and she has closed my enquiry………..I reopen the enquiry and go through the process once more and the same thing happens again. I call Airasia and they say “You need to talk to Ava” I said “I have and she doesn’t want to help me” Customer service guy continues with the same sentence and will not change tack and so we could have spent all day doing this and so I hung up before I became abusive.

I search for ages to try and get a contact for Airasia, an email address, a fax number, anything so that I did not have to go back to Ava but in the end I had no choice. So after saying hello to Ava Avatar I just entered random numbers until finally a link appeared that I could click on which opened up a new window where I could type a nice letter and so I did. So far the correspondence between myself and several Airasia reps would fill a library and I have still not had a resolution. I have never had to work so hard to get my $130 returned to me, I should start to charge Airasia for my time, for the phone calls, for having to go to the bank to get a copy of the initial transaction because after I gave them everything they asked for before they told me there were a few discrepancies with my name. This I feel is the new way businesses do business, they wear you out, they hope that you will give up and just think it’s all too hard, well let me tell you this Airasia………..I am Scottish and there is no way I will let you do me out of that money that is rightfully mine and I want an upgrade on my next flight.

Now Westpac was my next bitch. I got an email to tell me that they are changing from Visa to MasterCard and it will be sent to my PO Box. I called them and asked them to send it to my address in China, no problem was the reply. “Can I have an email address so that I can send you the address in Chinese?” “No sorry sir we cannot enter Chinese into the system, only English can be entered” I knew at this point that I was not going to see my new credit card in a hurry and nearly 5 weeks later I have been proved correct. I called Westpac today and they said “that’s a bit strange sir, you should have received it by now” you would think so. “We can send it again for you” I said “Can you give me an email contact so that I can send you the address both in English and Chinese?” “No not possible” “Can we send it to your PO Box sir?” “NO I’m in China” I hung up.

Now they also told me to talk to “Red” the Westpac avatar which quite frankly is completely useless if you are outside the country, in fact even when you call from overseas it just does not seem to register with the workers that you get on the end of the line. The rules are different if you are outside of Australia, you cannot use the same services and the solutions are also different and I’m amazed, disgusted that a company so large can’t manage to get my credit card from Australia to China. Other companies seem to be able to send coal, baby formula, vitamins but Westpac cannot send credit cards.

I have solved the problem by asking one of my Chinese friends in Australia to receive my card and then forward it to me, this is of course is an easy thing to do and I should have done this at the beginning of this process, but as I say you would think that a bank as big as Westpac can get my replacement card to me, but it does not give me much faith in the process if I lose it, or it gets stolen sometime in the future.

Not everything can be done online, in this global economy and especially when Australia and China are big trading partners I’m wondering why Westpac is unable to enter an address into their system in another language such as Chinese. They have the ability to do this in China and many other countries; surely they would have one person in the company that understands Chinese?