*********** ***** department/ Appalling customer service

<p>On Friday 10th June I deposited a few thousand rand into a new beneficiary account, and also requested an immediate payment. After an amount of time, the beneficiary had not received the money, so I logged back onto banking to check if payment had gone through. There was absolutely no proof of this transaction in my transaction history, nothing in 'pending' transactions etc. so I assumed it had not happened for some reason. Normally any payment made from an account shows up in transaction history immediately. I attempted to do the transaction again but then got a message to say that this transaction already existed (even though there was not a trace of it in my account history) I called online banking and they told me to call the ***** department to release the payment. I did this and they told me that the payment had been rejected. I asked why as there were sufficient funds etc. She couldnt answer that and assured me it was rejected and that I could do the deposit again - I did this with her on the phone and she then confirmed that it had gone through this time. She told me to log off and on again to check that it had gone through, however there were now two payments made to the beneficiary. I asked what this was and she said she couldn't see two payments - she only had one. Even after I gave her the transaction numbers, she couldn't see it. What kind of ***** department is this if they cant see what's going on? I told her to immediately reverse the 2nd payment but she said she couldn't. She told me to contact the beneficiary and ask them to refund me (in other words, I must fix their error) I refused to do this on principle, as it was clearly their error. After 2+ hours on a Friday evening I got nowhere. And, I'm still nowhere. I've even contacted my relationship manager who has forwarded it and is monitoring response, and I am still waiting, now almost a month later. I've had to ask the benefiary to refund me. What if I was dealing with a beneficiary who refused to refund me, or had used the funds? Not only has he incurred more bank fees but I have paid for two transactions with fees on immediate payments a lot higher. This is not about the affordability, its a matter of principle. Why must I pay for Absa's inefficiency and error? This is also proof that their ***** department is useless in dealing with potential *****. And I cant find words for the poor service - they clearly dont value their customers or consider customer service a priority.</p>