A Call Center Novel, Western Union, Xoom & Door-to-Door

As read in

Pangasinan Express/Northern Express newspapers

A Call Center Novel, Western Union, Xoom & Door-to-Door

The first time I experienced the Western Union (WU) service, I was as impressed as when I was with LBC’s on-time 24-hour delivery (a few years back. But as WU maintains its reputation, LBC has regressed in several of its branches). It takes just a matter of minutes, and when a call or text message takes a minute in sending the tracking number, so it does with WU. The trick is just to be ready with valid government issued identification cards such as an SSS, Driver’s License, even BIR, or Postal ID. Sometimes, school ID with backing current registration form, or company IDs are also honored (so much like most of bank transaction requirements nowadays).

Besides a speedy wire/money transfer, WU exchange rate is much higher than most if not all banks. The only disadvantage of using WU is the high rate of service fees. This has been looked upon by other financial institutions, and here in the Philippines, Equitable-PCIBank, or the Yupangco Group of Companies (YGC) tied up with Xoom, an online to offline international money transfer service, also using Cebuana Lhullier as its outlet. Of course let us presume we know the YGC as the bank, Yamaha, etc. People behind Xoom are from other financial and communication technologies institutions such as Paypal, NASDAQ, Fidelity Ventures, and a lot of the Silicon Valley mushrooms.

In Xoom’s website, money transfer takes a (few) minutes to 24 hours. In reality, it is like bank transfer. Thing with services is that, you will not know its efficiency and style unless you try it yourself. I did, to my dismay. It was a non-banking holiday the next day and I was hoping Xoom worked, not as expedient as WU, but at least, I gambled it would work like a few hours less competent than WU as it charges less than WU, although, there was also a catch: they had lower dollar-to-peso exchange rate (maybe, they have the same rate with the bank) and they charge additional for dollar pick-up/delivery. Nice try.

In short, I had a quite disturbing, literally, non-working and non-productive days from Thursday, non-banking holiday Friday, Saturday until Sunday. Tssk, tssk. So much for trying to control unnecessary expenditures by using passbook accounts… By using Xoom, I would have to adjust to the bank’s schedule. As you see, the hotline provided in their website was Equitable-PCI’s customer service.

Another point for call centers and customer service hotlines: you state a sentence, they answer immediately without-a-pause-what-so-ever with a novel. Of course, I am exaggerating, just quite close. But in short, all the call center lady wanted to say was that, “Please wait until the next banking day,” which was like after 3 more days (but it seemed eternity to me).

So that you’ll then know, “This is EPCI (bank) after all and not Xoom?!!!” And, well, the call center lady answered with a novel, only this time, she repeated the previous novel.

So I said, “I thought I was calling Xoom?” because my question was not answered.

Then the call center lady repeated the novel the third time. You must imagine how I feel. But I know you know how I feel if you’ve tried calling a corporate “customer service” hotline. If I had not known call centers are such a break for my fellow Filipinos, I could have cursed and slammed dunk the apparatus at hand ala Shaquille.

Anyway, there’s another trend with international wire transfers I am experimenting with at the moment and its bank-to-bank wire transfers charging only a one-time depositor fee and one-time receiver fee of about $10-11 per transaction no matter how much was being sent. I will keep you posted on that (as if I have a reader except me? Hello Planet Earth?) Last I tried with BPI, I was only deducted $11 and it took only 3-helluva working days!!! That was years of progression from the previous few months’ 10 working days!

The advantage with WU, banks & maybe, even Xoom is reliability, and the name, if not the so-called “brand”. But door-to-door money transfer still thrives among third world countries (to the chagrined of governments, mafias and the Pentagon guys) because some charge less and deliver right at the recipient’s doorstep reducing the embarrassment of not having institutional IDs. What has the mafias and Pentagon got to do with un-taxed remittances? Ask the banks nearest you… (but I’ll tell you if you try to contact me).