Since November last year, I’ve been using GCash whenever possible – paying bills, online and even daily purchases. It’s been a great experience as the service has been reliable and convenient. Until last Friday, March 1.

I needed to pay for my PLDT bill and the idea of cashing in at 7-Eleven came to mind. At first I tried to use the Gcash app to generate a code but it failed and so I decided to use the CLiQQ stand instead. Walked up to the kiosk, generated a receipt, queued up at the counter, handed over the cash and walked out the 7-eleven store after taking the receipt.

An hour has passed and already done with buying the things I needed to cook dinner, I checked my Gcash balance and my cash in has not yet been credited to my wallet. No confirmation SMS that the transaction was successful.

Calmly, I searched for Gcash’s Customer Support hotline when I got home. Made 4 calls to 2882 yet all I got was a pre-recorded message saying that there is no one available to assist and that a call back was scheduled instead.

That’s when I started to get really worried. It seems that Globe’s customer service has not improved that much. Not enough representatives to answer customer calls and responses took longer than what is reasonable. Even the GCash Care on Messenger took hours to get any real reply. Emails to support@gcash.com was even worse with nothing more than canned responses acknowledging my first email.

Then the callback from 2882 finally came – Saturday evening, a full 24 hours after I first reported my concern. They advised of the following:

The transaction failed on 7-Eleven’s side – there seems to be an issue with their ‘connection’ to GCash that cashing in is still unavailable.

Bring the receipt with me and ask for a refund. However, this needed to be worked on by 7-Eleven customer service which took another day.

Finally, after 3 days, I was able to get the refund from 7-Eleven. So much for trying the ‘convenience’ of reloading GCash via 7-Eleven stores.

Lessons learned:

• Always keep the receipt – it’s proof of your transaction
• GCash transactions generate SMS confirmation/alerts within minutes. If no SMS comes in, then it’s most likely that something went wrong with your transaction.
• Have patience. Tons of it. Dealing with GCash customer support will definitely take a lot of time and if you have an urgent need for the money or the transaction, it will really cause a lot of stress.

It will also help move things along if you contact the customer support of the other organization involved in the GCash transaction, in my case 7-eleven. This experience has left me with the feeling that GCash has real limits contrary to what their marketing team says: things could easily go wrong any time. Despite the modern tools and services we have today, integration and synergy between separate digital services is still a work in progress.

How’s your GCash experience so far? If you’d had similar or worse issue, feel free to share in the comments below.

Disclaimer: 

The author is not connected in any way to Globe, Inc, Mynt or GCash.