Citibank Customer Care or Corpse Care

Following an interesting development of the cancellation of a seldom used credit card, which I have described as a comment over this post, sometime two weeks back, I have called Citiphone Chennai (+914428584653 — CITIGOLD and +914428522484) and they confirmed me regarding closure of the said card and transfer of all credits, debits, rewards to my current credit card. Good. All assured and all good.

But in the progress of conversations, there were very interesting punctuated and non-sporadic miscomprehensions on part of Citiphone, as the case usually is. Here goes a humourous narration of the same.

For security reasons, the actual credit card numbers are suppressed in this blog post.

  1. I had a credit card which was issued as part of my deceased Suvidha Account, which I had sometime in 2003-04. Citibank offered an upgrade of the same to Gold Card in 2004 but as usual the maligned processes that haunt about everywhere, an useless Choice Card landed.
  2. Subsequently, a corrective process was launched and I did an out-of-turn Gold card too. Now instead of a single tracked Gold, I did have two cards. The ongoing corrective process of the bank, led the choice being upgraded to Gold sometime this year. In the melee, my current Gold did went through an upgrade process.
  3. Citiphone did not know how to link both the cards and hence I asked them to close the earlier Gold-only card and transfer the proceeds to the current upgraded card.  Wheneven I call Citibank to enquire about the GoldOnly Card, they always land up in getting the information the deceased card (which got promoted to the current upgraded set). I had to explain them about the non-linked buggy processes and to ‘train’ them in opening the card account of the other one. And this conversation with our Thikkuvay Thandavarayans.
  4. After a hectic and ardous hilarious comedy track drama, the mergers and acquisions came to a final deal. But then yesterday, I got a SMS from Citibank that “Your reissued card is being delivered through BlueDart courier”. When I called CitiPhone checking against my active card account or its immediately linked Gold Card (deceased), there were no upgradations or reissues. After playing through Step (3), they found out the older deceased card was reissued and has been despatched. While Citiphone did tell me that even if the card is recieved from BlueDart, I can simply destroy it since it is an invalid card as the card has already been closed. In effective, a virtual corpse (with a new card number embalmed) is being delivered through BlueDart. Just for the sake of processes and giving a hype of the numbers to show the number of cards issued, I think Citibank is resorting to such dead cards too.

This, I guess, is one more interesting melodrama and perhaps to reinstate the fact or affinity of Citibank in adhering to already closed cards.  So much of revenue waste and security hazards in sending useless plastic scraps which can otherwise be safely destroyed within the bank itself.

Perhaps there are some medicos in bank, who were trained in Royappettah Hospital Mortuary.