Some call this customer support and they pride themselves in working in this department, I call it serving 💩 to customers and most of the time, this is exactly what it is.
The whole thing started this morning, when my trading partner messaged me to let me know about an app that we can use for trading FOREX. I've been planning to get into FOREX, but have been postponing the decision, because picking the best broker is not an easy decision, you have to take a lot of things into consideration, make a list with pros and cons, which takes time and a lot of research. So when I got this recommendation, I was excited as I thought it would save me from a lot of trouble, but I was wrong.
The app is called Vantage and you can download it for free from the app store.
The registration process seemed pretty simple. After verifying my phone number, I had to fill out the usual form, with my personal data, which is necessary as it is about financial transactions and I thought in 2 minutes I'll have access to the platform and can test it. Oh boy, was I wrong? I was, big time!
When I got to Country of residence, I accessed the list and scrolled down to find my country, but my country wasn't on the list. Imagine my surprise, I couldn't believe my eyes. Not because I live in a very important country, but because once the app identified me based on my phone number, I didn't expect to meet this obstacle.
I'm going to drop here a screenshot I made of the list with the countries users are accepted from.
As you can see, there are 3 countries who's name starting with R and Romania is not among them. At that point I knew there's nothing left for me to do with this app, as long as I'm not allowed to use it, it's useless for me, but I thought let's ask customer support why are countries like Nigeria and Rwanda allowed and my country isn't, so I started the process.
Obviously first you have to converse with an AI bot, which is serving you bits and pieces from their F.A.Q. and some tutorials and in case you still don't have an answer to your problem, you are transferred to a human agent, as they call themselves. I skipped all the links served to me and asked to be transferred to a human agent, which in this case happened pretty fast.
The conversation I had with the human agent was worse than the AI, but first I'm going to drop the screenshot here for you to be able to read it, and I'll tell you the rest after.
This is the conversation I had with Farah, or I tried to have as I got nowhere and found no answer to my question.
After I told Farah that they are useless and got their apologies, they literally shot the door in my face. I'm not going to lie, I got pretty angry and uninstalled the app right away. Then I thought it would have been nice to save the conversation, but it was too late by then. Then surprise, surprise, I got an email with the transcript of the conversation, which was a huge surprise as this is not something that happens often, but was glad as now I can show it to you.
To eliminate any confusion, I'm not blaming this poor person for the poor English they used. It's not their fault. The employer is to blame for this and it paints a very poor picture about the company.
Imagine how low can some firms sink these days to save money or make more profit. They have AI that they can use in the first phase, which most of them do. I'm not saying implementing AI is free, but it saves them a great deal of money, because AI is never on sick leave and there's one initial payment to the coder to implement it, then maybe update it from time to time, but the rest is free. I was thinking replacing most of the customer support agents with AI would allow them to keep the best humans to deal with the cases that needs a human being, but I was wrong.
How can a person like Farah solve any problem? Tell me honestly? My question was a simple one, but imagine a case when transactions are stuck and details are of utmost importance and Farah can't put together a simple sentence, let alone understand what you're saying. Imagine your transaction being stuck and you have no one to talk to, because people like Farah are handling customer support, or trying to handle it, as what they did can't qualify as customer support.
My country is usually last on every decent list and makes the top of some lists for all the wrong reasons, but here, if you have to deal with customer support, after the call ends, you get another call or an email and you're invited to leave a feedback on how your case has been handled. The agent is evaluated based on feedback received and can lose their job the next day. Vantage doesn't have such a service, most likely it has been suspended after so many terrible reviews. Ok, I don't have evidence to back this up, but can imagine to be the case.
I had a look at the reviews and there are plenty of 1 ⭐️ reviews, like the one on the screenshot above. Imagine withdrawing your hard earned money, just to find out you can't have it for some technical reasons and there's no one to help you, because customer support is 💩.
Zooming out and looking at the bigger picture, I see two categories as far as companies are regarded. There are those who use AI to help them handle the light cases, and have a few professionals to handle the cases that need human brain, and there are those who use AI and have a set of cheap, unqualified, unprofessional people to shut customers up.
I truly hope Farah will be removed as soon as literally possible and replaced with someone who actually knows what it needs to be done.
Farah: We did not able to advised further on this as this decision is not made from our end
Farah: We only can advised Romania is not listed as country that we offered for our services as of now
Erika: Who made this decision?
Farah: We did not have any further information to disclosed this information
☝️ This is unacceptable!
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