[v12]

Hello All,
It's been more than a year that I have been using Paytm to pay all my/family bills online - electricity, phone etc. Have never faced any issues in any of the payments till date - be it payments or cashbacks or discounts. Most of the previous electricity bills always had the Paytm adveetisement on it - this month there was an advertisement for the PhonePe app. I have all my details (phone numbers, customer Id etc) saved on my Paytm account which makes it very easy and convenient to make payments. With a new app you have to enter all these details again which is a bit cumbersome - I still decided to give it a try.

Downloaded the app and immediately tried to do an Airtel post paid bill payment. Surprisingly, Airtel is not even listed as an operator on their app. So was back to Paytm to use their services. Still I thought I should give it a try with my electricity bill. Entered all my details and the amount got debited from my account. Being a first time user I also got a cashback into my PhonePe wallet. And immediately after that I received an error that the transaction has failed "Something went wrong. Please try again later. TXN_AUTO_FAILED" along with a Transaction ID.

Now this happened on 30-Aug and I immediately sent an inquiry asking what went wrong with the transaction and why it failed.

31-Aug - I receive a response from PhonePe that they regret the failed transaction and that the amount will be reversed within 7-9 working days (excluding Sat, Sun and public holidays)
Reversed where? Into my PhonePe wallet or into my bank account, I don't know - there was no mention of it. Also no mention of the reason why the transaction failed.

31-Aug to 3-Sep - Even after follow ups on the reason, all I got was the same response that the amount will be reversed within 7-9 days of the transaction.

12-Sep - (After 9 days) I sent a message asking for a status of the reversal and I get a response that the issue has been escalated to the higher authorities and will be resolved within the next 4 days (excluding Sat, Sun and public holidays).

16-Sep - I get a response from them - only after following up twice -
"Hi
We apologize for the inconvenience caused.
We would like to inform you that the transaction is failed & amount is not received by Phonepe so we request you to contact bank.
For further assistance please revert to us.
Regards
Phonepe"

To top it all - I tried using their "Call me back" facility but :


They missed a button saying :
NO PHONEPE - I DONT GET IT!

What I don't get is how hard it is to identify a failed transaction and inform the customer?
What I don't get is How hard it is to reverse an amount which was incorrectly debited? I agree a bank transaction would take a few days - but when apps have a Wallet option, why not use it instead of making them wait?
What I don't get is Why ask customer to contact the Bank of an issue has occured on a 3rd part App? Isn't it the App's responsibility to follow up for the reversal?
What I don't get is why have a Call Me Back option on your app when it doesn't work?

[GTO]

Quite a shocker, Allan. I'm surprised to see such a poor experience since PhonePe has Flipkart's muscle behind it.

Have been using PayTM for a year or so and it works like a charm. Don't get tempted by cash back offers from the new & untested .

[vinit.merchant]

Originally Posted by GTO

Have been using PayTM for a year or so and it works like a charm. Don't get tempted by cash back offers from the new & untested .

I too blindly used Paytm for all my recharges and petty payments to vendors not accepting cards. It was always a pleasant experience, until recently when I recharged 150 bucks on my nephews Idea prepaid number.
At first it was under processing status for 1 day. Next day it gave me an option to cancel the earlier recharge and do a new one. Did that, and it went through, showing recharge as successful at Idea. But the recharge never appeared on the Idea number.
Now the ball is being thrown between Paytm and Idea. Paytm says its done in their system and problem is with operator, and Idea says they have not received the money so no recharge. This is going on since a month now. Probably those 150 bucks will have to be written off by me.

Have decided that from now on, it is best to recharge from the operators site and not rely on Paytm.

[GTO]

All that money and still a poor user experience.

The unified payments interface (UPI) based payments app, PhonePe has received $38.7 million (Rs 254.43 crore) from its parent company Flipkart via its Singapore-based group company Flipkart Payments Pvt. Ltd., reports VCCircle. This investment in PhonePe was made on August 31, 2017, by allocating 1.76 million shares at Rs 1,445.29 per share to Flipkart Payments Pvt. Ltd.

This is the third tranche of funds injected in PhonePe, since it was acquired by Flipkart in April 2016. The earlier ones were:

October 2016: Rs 83.68 crore by allocating 4.18 million shares at Rs 200 per share.

April 2016: Rs 102.94 crore via allocation of 5.42 million shares at Rs 190 per share.

Worse still is the fact that the CEO has no clue about its problems. New money is going on expanding the team & marketing, but not the app experience.

Sameer Nigam, PhonePe’s CEO, told ET that the funds will be utilised to add new members to the team and to increase marketing initiatives.

Source