Oursourced American Express customer service is the worst.

I’ve been trying to order American Express gift cards off their website and I keep running into a problem where my orders are denied because I am supposedly exceeding the quantity or dollar values. The problem is I am not since you’re allowed $5,000 in gift card purchases every 14 days. The last time I had a successful gift card order was almost a month ago on April 6th, 2010.

You get an e-mail from American Express stating your order was denied and why. You are also given a number to call for American Express Gift Card services.

The frustration starts when you call American Express Gift Card customer service. I’ve had repeated calls about several orders and I get increasingly annoyed each time. First I’ll tell them that my order was denied for going over purchaser limits and I believe this is in error. They will ask for the order number and then put me on hold to do “research”. After a couple minutes they will come back on the phone and repeat what I just said to them in that I was over purchaser limits. I have to then explain to them why I’m not over the purchaser limits and they usually agree after using math to figure out my last successful order was more than 14 days ago.

Here’s where it gets really frustrating and 2 or 3 of the customer service reps have tried to pull this one. They will tell me to call my bank and get the issue fixed with them. This is clearly not the issue at all because the charges do go through and it’s the gift card services department at Amex that denies the order, not anyone else. The biggest frustrating factor is that the CSR simply doesn’t know how to solve the issue so they are trying to get you off the phone.

The biggest issue lies in the fact that these agents that you are able to talk to on the phone have no ability whatsoever to approve or deny gift card orders. The last person I spoke to the on phone finally admitted this, they are simply there to take orders and whatnot. There is also no way to contact the back end which approves/cancels orders.

So I think I give up.