By Customer service staff are equally as confused as their clients when enquiring about EcoCash allowing users to have both a Zimdollar and a foreign currency wallet using the same phone number. If you have an EcoCash account, you naturally already have the foreign currency account (FCA).
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For now only two foreign currency accounts are available, the Rand account and the USD account. They work just like the Zimdollar wallet; you can receive money, make payments, send to others, cash out etc.
To access this FCA wallet, you simply dial *151# → Option 7 ‘Wallet Services’→Option 5 ‘Multicurrency’→Option 1 ‘Change Currency’→Choose the currency you want. You will have to go through the same process to switch back to the local currency.
You can use this FCA wallet to make payments. But how do you get money into that account? Only two options remain; either you receive money from remittances or from another FCA wallet user sending you money.
You can no longer cash in yourself. You could have the foreign currency in hand that you want to use to pay for something or to send to someone else but you cannot simply cash in that money. This is weird.
In Zimbabwe, both the government and private companies that can accept deposits are bending over backwards to get people to deposit/ cash-in their forex. It stinks to high heaven that EcoCash won’t allow you to cash in.
EcoCash officially launched the FCA wallet back in late 2018 but only 17 months later EcoCash was triumphantly announcing ‘FCA wallet is BACK’. In only 17 months the service had been launched, fallen down to purgatory and resurrected.
The ups and downs over the years ended up causing confusion even amongst EcoCash customer service employees. Today, like I mentioned, the service is still up and running albeit with some features missing.
EcoCash customer service personnel said one could cash in USD/Rand at any Econet shop.
Go to an Econet shop and you will be told cash-ins could only be done at Avondale and two other branches.
A distressed customer said,
“That wasn’t my first 8 minute call. I had tried several times before the ‘efficient’ guy picked up. Twice, the network just dropped as I was making my query. Annoyed me to no end. Why was that only happening after someone picked up? Yet another time, another lady was almost as impatient as the ‘efficient’ guy and hung up. “
At the Avondale Econet shop one customer was told they no longer accept cash-ins.No branch accepted cash-ins anymore.
The customer service personnel via call, twitter, Facebook etc, On all those platforms, assured one client they could cash in at any Econet branch.
I told them I had been told otherwise at two branches and they assumed I had tried to do this way back when the service was initially suspended.
But they were wrong as Somehow, the memo had reached the Econet shops but skipped the customer service desks.
How that happened, one wonders. If we can’t trust what customer service tells us then why do they even exist. You would think the people who respond to customer queries would be the first to be notified when there are changes to products and services. Someone forgot to tell them, it happens.
No wonder the physical branch won’t die
Recently we saw DStv backtrack on the decision to close their Joina City branch. They are yet to tell us why they changed their mind but if the EcoCash customer service story is anything to go by, remote customer service still has a long way to go in Zimbabwe.
Not only did the EcoCash customer service staff give outdated information, they hung up multiple times. It took all the patience to hang on, only to get false information.
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