Bad experience with Maynilad-Parañaque Branch

Rewards Program Not So Rewarding After All
 
What I thought would be a simple telephone request has turned into a fruitless search for answers that never came.  I’m an employee in a huge multinational firm that requires all its employees to use the American Express card for business related expenses including hotel and travel arrangements.  Since my line of work requires frequent trips overseas, I have accumulated thousands of points in my credit card.  Luckily, these points can be exchanged for items or gift checks as long as you pay the American Express annual membership fee of Two Thousand Five Hundred Pesos out of your own pocket.  Since I’ve been compliant on this requirement, I was confident that I would easily be able to choose from the list of rewards that American Express offers based on the number of points I had on my card.  And so I found out the hard way that AMEX does not make this happen very easily.  As a matter of fact, they have found a way to make it more difficult and painful than pulling teeth.  Here’s how.         
 
Last year, sometime in October, I received the American Express rewards brochure.  I excitedly perused its pages, looking for attractive items I can exchange for the points I had incurred.  There was the weekend stay in a five star beach resort, entertainment systems, household items and gift checks.  After thinking things through, I decided that gift checks would be the best use for my points to give as gifts to my growing nephews and nieces.  So I placed the order over the phone.  I was told the gift checks would arrive in the mail in 4 weeks.  Well, that would mean I would receive it sometime in November, well way before Christmas.  No sweat.  December came and still no gift checks in the mail.  I made a follow up call and was told the request was not processed.  What??  This after waiting for 4 weeks?  What the…?!  Even a saint would curse at this.  Hundreds of expletives filled my mind, all trying to come out of my mouth in a steady flow.  Instead of giving in to the temptation of shouting at the call center agent though, with my voice quivering, I patiently asked when I would receive the gift checks.  It’ll arrive on December 29th.  That’s very helpful, as I can see in my mind the rest of my family members exchanging gifts on Christmas Day while I stare at them empty handed, cursing American Express for its inefficiency and lack of customer service.  In hindsight, that was last year, when I received the gift checks well into the first 2 weeks of January.  I can no longer recall what I gave my nephews and nieces on Christmas Day, though I still remember the grief that AMEX brought me over the holidays.
 
Moving to the next part of the story, you would think I learned my lesson and stopped being a member of AMEX, right?  Wrong.  I still paid the membership fee this year and being the optimistic person that I am, vowed to make the call for the rewards earlier, perhaps thinking that September would be early enough and that the folks at BDO (who bought American Express two years ago, about the same time my story started) would surely have instituted improvements in their system.  Wrong again.  After calling on September 29th, I was given a reference number, with the call center agent promising me that my Sodexo gift checks would arrive 4 weeks later on October 29th.  November came and still no gift checks.  I made a follow up call and was told that due to a “system error,” my request was not processed.  This time, I found myself speechless.  How can a company of this caliber –ck up twice in a row?  It’s unbelievable.  Is this a deliberate attempt to sabotage the American Express reputation or have the management people behind AMEX lost their minds?  As before, I made a conscious attempt to remain civilized and instead demanded to speak to the manager.  I can’t say she was any better than the call center agent but she did try to appease me.  She said she would attend to the request immediately and would call me in a week.  Surprisingly, she did call the following week and promised me that the gift checks would arrive at the end of November.  As I write this today on December 1st, I have not received a single gift check from American Express.  This time, I think I’ve learned my lesson.  American Express in the Philippines should be renamed American Delay.  Too bad the reputation they have built up over the years has completely been decimated by their Rewards program.  It’s the only the only rewards program I know that has turned out to be not so rewarding after all.