The Incompetent Call Center
Very early this morning before I went to sleep, I got an email saying that my Live account couldn’t be renewed because the credit card on file had expired. A couple years ago this had happened, and we no longer had the CC that it was linked to. This involved a fairly painless process of calling Xbox Support, telling them the situation, and they gave me the last 4 digits of the card that was on file so that I could change it to a valid one. Oh how stupid of me to assume this process would be just as easy.
I went and got the only Visa card we have just to test if that might be the card on file. I put in the last 4 digits of that card and got the error message “Unable to continue due to technical difficulties. Please try again later.” Well, either the card was wrong or the Live servers were having issues, so I just decided to wait until sometime later today. After my mom and I had lunch, I decided I would try again: same error. So, I get on the phone to the support number and get connected to some Indian/Pakistani lady. Apparently in the past two years the call center has been moved overseas since the last time I did this, I spoke to an American.
I give her my name, gamertag, and all that fun stuff, then she wants my phone number and address. This is where the whole even began to become problematic. I couldn’t remember ever updating my account information after we moved (turns out I had), so I gave her all of the information for our house in HP. She seemed content with that, so we then moved on to what the problem was. I had to tell her about 5 times that I did not have a 360 and repeat the error to her at least 6 or 7 times, and we were still getting absolutely nowhere. Finally she tells me to log online and see if I can change it there, and it turns out that in the past two years that feature has become available. So, I spent 35 minutes on the phone trying to solve a problem with a lady that apparently could not have told you what my problem was if her life depended on it after multiple, step-by-step explanations of what I was doing and where I was running into trouble when I could have easily solved it on my own.
It’s interesting that your account was converted to a 360 account when you tried getting it onto my 360 even though it was unsuccessful. Stupid, but interesting.