This is another post regarding my ongoing problems with MFC which is a South African company and does motor vehicle financing.
On a daily basis, I get phone calls from them regarding the monthly vehicle payment when the monthly payment has been done and the proof of payment has been sent.
Every time such a call comes in, it is either nobody on the phone or it is this "Hold the line please..." voice until minutes later someone finally is on the call. This then gets followed by at least three different identification steps which are becoming rather tedious when they should have on record for years that I am the only person answering the phone on that number.
This has been going for months and I have the distinct impression that their systems are very messed up and never up to date. Since they are part of Nedbank, I would expect the data communication between MFC and Nedbank would work perfectly, but even payments into a Nedbank account has issues at times.
Clearly there are several problems that nobody is actually looking at and the customers end up having to deal with the trouble that the bank should actually sort out.
Friday, September 20, 2019
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Do not ever use MFC to finance your vehicle! Here are several reasons from personal experience.
I have been helping someone to finance a vehicle and in this case, I am not actually paying anything, but the vehicle is under my name until it is paid off (big mistake as I found out).
The whole mess started right at the beginning with MFC messing up with the initial debit order and the payments then being a month in arrears. According to MFC, it is my fault, because they started with harassment calls daily until payment is made.
Each call from MFC is also starting with a multiple step verification process which gets rather annoying. Why they do not take note that certain phone numbers are only answered by a single person, is beyond me since then the calls can be streamlined. Sending complaints is not resulting in anything either.
Months later, they finally offered that I should send in writing the details of the person who is doing the payments so that that person can be contacted directly. In the end, that was done repeatedly and MFC still called me because the vehicle is under my name and they are not allowed to contact anyone else. Why this was made an option in the first place, I do not know. In the meantime, there were also some account managers from MFC involved in the process. This story went on for about a year.
Recently, there was a situation where the payment was done on 7 November and I was getting calls twice a day from MFC after that date. Somehow, they could not find the payment in their records. On 14 November it was decided to reverse the payment which takes five days, meaning that payment can be done the earliest on 22 November, possibly 23 November. In the meantime, the twice-daily harassment calls continue and I have to repeat the same story to every person calling.
Between 7 and 14 November, I was also told to send a proof of payment, but I was never told an email address where to send it to. In the meantime, the harassment calls kept on coming.
In the end, I am always the one getting punished every time MFC makes yet another blunder.
If I ever have to advise a motor vehicle finance company it will be in the line of: "Anyone else except MFC!"
It also seems very much like that the call centre staff takes notes, but nothing ever happens with those notes on the account since nobody seemed to know between 7 and 14 November that a payment has been done on 7 November and that I mentioned that on multiple occasions. Even more reason for me to get more and more angry with MFC. Their system seems rather disjointed and probably antiquated and there is some incompetence somewhere.
The whole mess started right at the beginning with MFC messing up with the initial debit order and the payments then being a month in arrears. According to MFC, it is my fault, because they started with harassment calls daily until payment is made.
Each call from MFC is also starting with a multiple step verification process which gets rather annoying. Why they do not take note that certain phone numbers are only answered by a single person, is beyond me since then the calls can be streamlined. Sending complaints is not resulting in anything either.
Months later, they finally offered that I should send in writing the details of the person who is doing the payments so that that person can be contacted directly. In the end, that was done repeatedly and MFC still called me because the vehicle is under my name and they are not allowed to contact anyone else. Why this was made an option in the first place, I do not know. In the meantime, there were also some account managers from MFC involved in the process. This story went on for about a year.
Recently, there was a situation where the payment was done on 7 November and I was getting calls twice a day from MFC after that date. Somehow, they could not find the payment in their records. On 14 November it was decided to reverse the payment which takes five days, meaning that payment can be done the earliest on 22 November, possibly 23 November. In the meantime, the twice-daily harassment calls continue and I have to repeat the same story to every person calling.
Between 7 and 14 November, I was also told to send a proof of payment, but I was never told an email address where to send it to. In the meantime, the harassment calls kept on coming.
In the end, I am always the one getting punished every time MFC makes yet another blunder.
If I ever have to advise a motor vehicle finance company it will be in the line of: "Anyone else except MFC!"
It also seems very much like that the call centre staff takes notes, but nothing ever happens with those notes on the account since nobody seemed to know between 7 and 14 November that a payment has been done on 7 November and that I mentioned that on multiple occasions. Even more reason for me to get more and more angry with MFC. Their system seems rather disjointed and probably antiquated and there is some incompetence somewhere.
Labels:
bad service,
blunder,
harassment calls,
incompetent,
mfc
Thursday, December 21, 2017
Small Trove clubs are doomed
When Trion introduced the Trove Adventures update it was supposed to improve clubs. To some extent, this has happened, but things were introduced that kill clubs.
These features coupled with members not bothering to log in or actually complete adventures is what gives the huge clubs a massive advantage. Members of the huge clubs get faster to the better fixtures and club levels. The members who care, end up flocking to the clubs that advertise a club level higher than 1.
The club killers are the following features:
1. Being able to change your displayed club only once every 24 hours. This also prevents being able to see any club messages of any other joined clubs of the total of five clubs.
2. Club levels take a long time if only one or two members of a club make an effort, especially if those members are only casual players who only play one to two hours at most per day.
3. Fixtures are the main causes of clubs being killed. They provide bonuses, but to upgrade them or to buy new fixtures, a club level of 4 is needed and a lot of Clubits.
Nice features are:
1. More member levels and being able to set permissions.
2. Fixtures bonuses if the club is big.
Expected side effects:
1. More players stopping to play Trove.
2. Even more dead clubs.
3. Possibly some more "elite" clubs appearing eventually.
These features coupled with members not bothering to log in or actually complete adventures is what gives the huge clubs a massive advantage. Members of the huge clubs get faster to the better fixtures and club levels. The members who care, end up flocking to the clubs that advertise a club level higher than 1.
The club killers are the following features:
1. Being able to change your displayed club only once every 24 hours. This also prevents being able to see any club messages of any other joined clubs of the total of five clubs.
2. Club levels take a long time if only one or two members of a club make an effort, especially if those members are only casual players who only play one to two hours at most per day.
3. Fixtures are the main causes of clubs being killed. They provide bonuses, but to upgrade them or to buy new fixtures, a club level of 4 is needed and a lot of Clubits.
Nice features are:
1. More member levels and being able to set permissions.
2. Fixtures bonuses if the club is big.
Expected side effects:
1. More players stopping to play Trove.
2. Even more dead clubs.
3. Possibly some more "elite" clubs appearing eventually.
Thursday, November 23, 2017
The incompetence of Nedbank MFC
A bit more than one year ago, I was involved with helping my tenants to buy a small motor vehicle. In this case, the financial organisation involved is MFC which is a division of Nedbank.
The problems started in the very first month after initial payment where MFC messed up the date of the debit order and tried to withdraw money on a date when there was no money on the account. This had repercussions down the line because of being behind with payments according to MFC when in the meantime, the debit order happened before salary was paid into the account. Multiple attempts to correct this debit order date have failed. Payments are done manually every month since then.
Another major annoyance is when asking at the bank, the bank says that payments are up to date, but MFC calls me about payments being in arrears. This is a timing issue as far as I can tell. The arrears amount suddenly showed up even when the statement shows payments were done.
Lately, MFC has decided to call me daily, always a different person on the phone. After a verification process, I end up having to tell that person the long saga. A few times I have been told to send an email to a particular email address to get a consent form. I tried that four times over months with no response while the calls keep on coming. The consent form is needed to allow MFC calling the person who does the payments.
Recently, I started sending complaints, sent inquiries and emailed the specified email address daily. After three days, I suddenly had three people responding by email. Even after sending the third party details, I still end up getting daily calls.
All that MFC seems to see is that payments are in arrears. That monthly payments happen, seems to be ignored. They also do not seem to be happy with the plan to pay more monthly in order to get rid of this mysterious arrears amount. They call me daily about payment, while a plan is in place to sort out their mess, but they punish me for it.
If I had known that MFC has an antiquated silo system and does not stick to their own system, I would have avoided them completely.
Update 15 January 2018:
The call center people have yet again started calling me weekly. Nobody seems to tell them about the consent form that I filled in and sent.
Original publish date: 23 November 2017
The problems started in the very first month after initial payment where MFC messed up the date of the debit order and tried to withdraw money on a date when there was no money on the account. This had repercussions down the line because of being behind with payments according to MFC when in the meantime, the debit order happened before salary was paid into the account. Multiple attempts to correct this debit order date have failed. Payments are done manually every month since then.
Another major annoyance is when asking at the bank, the bank says that payments are up to date, but MFC calls me about payments being in arrears. This is a timing issue as far as I can tell. The arrears amount suddenly showed up even when the statement shows payments were done.
Lately, MFC has decided to call me daily, always a different person on the phone. After a verification process, I end up having to tell that person the long saga. A few times I have been told to send an email to a particular email address to get a consent form. I tried that four times over months with no response while the calls keep on coming. The consent form is needed to allow MFC calling the person who does the payments.
Recently, I started sending complaints, sent inquiries and emailed the specified email address daily. After three days, I suddenly had three people responding by email. Even after sending the third party details, I still end up getting daily calls.
All that MFC seems to see is that payments are in arrears. That monthly payments happen, seems to be ignored. They also do not seem to be happy with the plan to pay more monthly in order to get rid of this mysterious arrears amount. They call me daily about payment, while a plan is in place to sort out their mess, but they punish me for it.
If I had known that MFC has an antiquated silo system and does not stick to their own system, I would have avoided them completely.
Update 15 January 2018:
The call center people have yet again started calling me weekly. Nobody seems to tell them about the consent form that I filled in and sent.
Original publish date: 23 November 2017
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
Linux live DVD screen resolution too high
Recently I got hold of a new graphics card after my old card died from overheating. The new card is a NVidia 1060GT with 6GB RAM. It can handle 4K, but my screen cannot.
My big problem is now that the live CDs/DVDs of different Linux distributions all switch to a resolution that is far too high for the screen. Nouveau also complains about an unknown chipset.
A text only distribution like Arch Linux does not have this issue since it does not switch out of text mode.
I have tried various options like modeset=0, nouveau.modeset=0, nvidia.modeset=0 and others, nothing worked.
The following Ubuntu bug report mentions NVidia Pascal chipsets. It looks like I need to get yet again the latest distro to get past this issue.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1602340
Hopefully the latest distro will work. I have used Mint lately which is based on Ubuntu. As long as I can get access to my data, it does not matter what distro is in use.
My big problem is now that the live CDs/DVDs of different Linux distributions all switch to a resolution that is far too high for the screen. Nouveau also complains about an unknown chipset.
A text only distribution like Arch Linux does not have this issue since it does not switch out of text mode.
I have tried various options like modeset=0, nouveau.modeset=0, nvidia.modeset=0 and others, nothing worked.
The following Ubuntu bug report mentions NVidia Pascal chipsets. It looks like I need to get yet again the latest distro to get past this issue.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1602340
Hopefully the latest distro will work. I have used Mint lately which is based on Ubuntu. As long as I can get access to my data, it does not matter what distro is in use.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
