A friend of mine is leaving Hong Kong. He’s been having fun with PCCW – I’m leaving HK, I need to cancel my landline, etc. Of course, they won’t accept a scanned copy of their forms via email. He has to fax the form to them.
Here’s an email he received from PCCW yesterday:
Dear Mr Q,Thank you for your kindly reply.
Regarding to your termination request, kindly be informed that we have passed your termination from to our concerned department, please rest assured that they will handle your case according.
With understand you would like to receive the final bill via email, kindly be informed that we unable to send the full bill details by email due to verification and security purposes, kindly be invited that to provide us a oversea address, so that we may arrange to send a Final Bill to your oversea address accordingly.
Should you have any further enquiries, please feel free to e-mail us.
Yours sincerely,
XX XXXXXX
Customer Service Executive
PCCW Email Team
It’s not the poor English. The message can be understood clearly enough and that’s what counts. Be grateful we’re living in a part of China where one can conduct business with the government and major companies in English.
And it’s not the fault of poor Mr. X. He’s just following policies set by the company. As Lenny Bruce said, “people confuse authority and the people who have authority vested in them.”
It certainly is the fault of PCCW, a company with policies that seem to be deliberately designed to prevent people from cancelling accounts, even when they are leaving the country.
And that begs the question – if Pacific Century Cyber Works can’t come up with a way to verify someone’s email address, how can they verify that the overseas address they’ve been given is correct and then verify that the piece of snail mail they are sending out gets delivered to the correct address and opened only by the individual it was addressed to? It just makes no logical sense.
Except, they already know this. They’re just purposely trying to be as annoying as possible.
I had a friend leave HK last month. He worked by the PCCW center that was listed as the return address for his notice to discontinue service so he walked over with the notice. They told him that he could not hand it to him but it had to be mailed. But this is the address to mail it to, he responded, and they agreed and told him to mail his notice. He clarified that he could walk across the street and mail the notice but he could not give it to them.
He had some other problems discontinuing service that had to do with them ignoring previous agreements (which they acknowledged) while still telling him that they couldn’t honor their end of the agreements due to some type of policy. He ended up telling them that he was unable to honor his agreement to give back his router and equipment until they honored their agreement. It was insane.