For milk, trust the expiry date. Not so for your Qantas flight credit

But the credit disappeared before checkout. So I called the call centre. (It’s fantastic that Qantas has this help line — it’s among the ways the airline has been making using travel credits easier throughout the pandemic, a spokesman later told me.) But the call centre could not help me. In fact, it told me that my credit had expired the day before the expiry date.

I reasoned with the woman on the other end of the line, but on this she was clear: the expiry date on a credit is the day before the expiry date indicated. Quoting ACCC credit note rules to her made no impact. Eventually, there was no more to be said. My credit was gone. So I jumped onto Twitter to vent my frustration that Qantas vouchers, unlike milk or any other consumer product, were apparently only good until the day before the expiry date given.

And lo and behold, in response to my tweet, Qantas customer service sprang into action. In a quick and courteous couple of private messages, the carrier requested the details of the credit and reinstated it manually with an expiry date at the end of this year.

Now, that could be the end of the matter. I’m all right, Jack. But I am left with a niggling sense of the injustice of this process. If I did not have the technical literacy to navigate my way through the complicated booking-to-voucher matching process that accessing the credit requires, the flexibility to wait on the phone during work hours, a Twitter account or who knows what little cachet a column can muster, the credit would have been lost forever. And that strikes me as fundamentally unfair.

It is part of a larger trend which has left many customers feeling like an inconvenience. Giving a company money is rarely complicated, while receiving service is getting harder and apparently increasingly dependent on having an advanced degree, being tech-savvy and, better yet, having a handful of strings to pull.

This has coincided with the rise of tech companies such as Google and Uber, which are notoriously impossible to get hold of when something goes wrong. Google provides Gmail free of charge and free of support. It’s simply monetising you and if you have a problem, you’ll have to Google the solution. Turns out there are a bunch of people Googling Google who are just as baffled as you.

Uber also doesn’t want to talk to you – or to its driver “partners”. They take your money and give the “partners” a cut. Simples. Likewise with social media. You’re free to go elsewhere if you don’t like it. Except that there is no real elsewhere available. You’ve got no choice but to cough up $44 billion to buy the damn thing outright, as Elon Musk recently did. That’s one way to get the engineers out of bed quick-smart when your Super Bowl tweet gets less engagement than one by the president of the United States.

But if you’re short that kind of change, you just have to lump it.

Now it’s gone beyond tech companies. Many big corporates, from telcos to credit card issuers, are reducing contact with their individual customers. And those customers have little recourse when every company is doing the same.

These companies no longer even bother to market themselves as great to deal with. Instead, they set themselves apart by committing to social causes. Their corporate customers – and that’s where the fat margins are – also care about these causes. And between them, nobody has to care that those with limited access to the internet, challenges in navigating technology or rudimentary English are bankrolling the cause-marketing by falling through the cracks. The process might be ageist, racist and elitist but the companies would insist they certainly are not.

I may be a lone voice on this in an era of corporate social responsibility, but I would prefer companies focused on value, not values. It seems to me that if they get the first one right, the second will take care of itself.

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