Ever made exhaustive rounds between your bank and a shop just trying to retrieve your money as a result of a failed transaction? One way these failed transactions happen is when you try to make a payment and your account is debited but without getting a notification that the payment was a success and you end up having to pay again.
From now on you will be spared that horrible experience as ZimSwitch has introduced what it calls a ZimSwitch Query and Dispute Management System (ZQDMS) which will make it way easier and much quicker for customers to resolve their queries, e.g failed transactions. With a disproportionate majority of people and companies now using electronic money in the back of chronic shortages, ZimSwitch thought it wise to come up with ZQDMS to improve the customer experience in its ecosystem.
Before the introduction of ZQDMS, you had to suffer waiting for weeks or a month at most to see your transaction reversed and have your money in the account. It was a frustrating experience for a customer. But ZQDMS improves on that by significantly cutting down the weeks of having your money back into just 48 hours. Which is laudable. It would have been way nicer if the queries were resolved within a day or in a matter of hours because most of the times you’d want to use the money urgently. But anyway 48 hours, is now relatively better.
This 48 hour is in some cases way shorter than the time EcoCash takes to return my money back in the wallet. I remember one time I accompanied my friend to tread the streets of Harare for 3 consecutive days just to retrieve his money from Ecocash. And of course, there was a bit of paperwork that was involved in that whole process.
In light of that, even though ZQDMS now reduces weeks into days, the process is still the same, you still have to make do with signing papers and filling in forms to get your money back. Accordingly, even so, ZQDMS will still need to be improved to do away with the awful paperwork and have customers retrieve their money by just interacting with ZimSwitch online.
3 comments
It’s a shame to have a management system for such queries. Such things should be automated,
It’s a shame to have a management system for such queries. Such things should be automated, the errors are there in the banking system logs, plain as daylight. The banks customer care staff can see it quickly when you call in, just that because of bureacracy some guy has to sign-off on the refund and is never in the office. By the nature of switching system protocols, there are extremely few cases when the logs say both legs of a transaction completed yet one of them failed.
In my opinion, it’s just laziness and partial greed. Remember that some people don’t think it’s worth following up on a failed $2 transaction and they leave it at that. So, the banks don’t want to automatically refund such generous people, they’d rather point out to you that you have 14 days within which to dispute transactions on your statement. Ironically, a bank can back-date a 3 month old bank charge, they omitted (for whatever reason), but you only have 14 days to claim what’s rightfully yours.
Thanks Techzim, however you did not explain how this will exactly happen is it online through the banks or what.Please be clear.