A Call Center Rep Gave My Credit Card Number to a Third Party

Are your contact center reps treating your customers in a way that best represents your brand? Are they staying within the confines of applicable laws when making upsell and cross-sell offers, especially those for third parties?

Are you sure?

Here’s why I ask:

I ordered a home product from a catalog in July. I had previously ordered from this company with no problems. After taking my order, the contact center rep launched into a rambling, barely decipherable cross-sell offer of joining some third-party shopping club in which I could get discounts on other products not related to the catalog.

I said “no” to the offer.

The rep said, “But they’ll send you a free $25 gift card for gasoline just for reading the materials.”

I said, “I’m not interested.” I wanted to get off the phone. This task of ordering one item was taking too long, and what was this guy talking about in this rushed cross-sell offer? He talked so fast I couldn’t understand him, as if he was one of those narrators at the end of car commercials on the radio.

Then he said, “Well, can I get the last four digits of your credit card number to verify that we spoke about the offer?”

I stopped. “Why do you need my credit card number for that?”

He said, “I don’t know; they need it.”

I was silent for a moment, and then figured I had just given him the number for the order, so it wasn’t as if it was a big secret to him; plus, he wasn’t asking for the full number. I said, “I won’t be charged for anything, right?”

He said in a light-hearted voice, “No, don’t worry.”

A week later I received a brochure from the shopping club that I read and shredded. I saw no mention in the materials that I’d be charged for membership if I didn’t cancel it.

A month later I got my credit card bill, and — yes, you guessed it — on it was a charge of $96 for membership in the shopping club. I thought my head would explode.

Canceled a Membership I Never Ordered

I spent an exasperating 45 minutes on a Saturday afternoon resolving this issue, canceling the club membership that I never ordered, and then talking to two reps at the catalog telling them I specifically said “no” to the offer, and the catalog had given my credit card number to a third party anyway!

I called my credit card company, American Express, telling it what happened, and requested it open an investigation into the matter, which it did. For my trouble, American Express gave me a free one-year membership in its rewards program, which I happily accepted.

The following Monday, I called the vice president of marketing at the catalog, someone I had spoken with previously in my role here at Catalog Success. I left a message explaining what happened. He called back within the hour and asked for more details. Three days later he said he was awaiting the transcript from the call, but that his company’s call center officials listened to the tape and determined they did nothing wrong.

“At some point in the conversation, you said ‘yes’ to something or ‘uh-huh,’ or you grunted,” he said.

“But not to a charge of $96 for membership in a shopping club. I would’ve remembered that. I specifically said ‘no’ to the offer,” I said.

When I mentioned this incident at work, a colleague said she’d just ordered from the same catalog, got the same aggressive cross-sell, agreed to look at the club’s information, and got in the mail not just the brochure but a separate white paper noting she’d be charged $96 for membership if she didn’t cancel. She showed me the packet. I never got such a sheet in my packet from the shopping club, and so I never received written notice that I had to cancel the membership to avoid the $96 charge.

I talked with the catalog’s vice president of marketing several more times after this, and he told me the catalog uses an outside call center, and the rep who took my order had been reprimanded and was being retrained. He did not say the rep had been fired.

American Express later cleared the $96 charge from my bill.

Take Me Off the List

Although I love the home product I ordered from this catalog I still requested to be taken off of its mailing list and will never order from it or its sister catalogs again. Its call center has proven to me it cannot handle my information — including my credit card number, for pete’s sake! — in a responsible way.

I plan to report this company to The Direct Marketing Association’s Ethics Committee. I believe we have to police our own industry.

Why am I writing about this unfortunate incident? It’s the exact kind of practice that hurts the direct marketing industry as a whole. And it’s the type of incident that sends consumers screaming to their legislators requesting protection from all direct marketers.

I’ve thought about if I should mention the catalog company and shopping club by name in this column, but after serious soul searching and talks with our Editorial Advisory Board, I decided against it. I think the real problem isn’t those two particular companies. Rather, it’s that their actions are the type that all direct marketers who implement aggressive third-party cross-sells need to be wary of. The result of such programs can be damaging to your catalog brand, the shopping experiences of your hard-won customers and in the long run, your company’s health.

If you’ve mandated that your reps make cross-sell offers on behalf of third parties, are you sure the type of incident I experienced isn’t happening in your contact center?

Really … are you sure?