Poor customer service

I have a TFG account which I never use and on the rare occasion that I do use it, I settle my balance within a few days and will never leave a balance over to the next month. I’ve had this account for a few years and due to not using it much, I was not aware of the cycle which TFG works on (it’s difficult to keep up especially when different stores as well as the different banks all have different cycles). I was looking for an item in store but could not find sizes and I therefore decided to check online where I found a few items I liked and decided to place an order. I had the items in my cart for a while and was in no hurry to place my order. I decided to place my order on the 12th of September before I forgot to place it at all and I just decided to put it onto my account for ease of payment at that moment. I only received my order the following week and every item from my order arrived separately on different days as well. I had to return some of the items as they did not fit and I had to wait for these to reflect on the account before I could settle my balance. This whole process took over a week and I finally settled the balance only to notice that I was charged a service fee of R28. Turns out that TFG’s cycle runs from the 12th to the 12th of each month so just because of my bad timing of placing my order on the 12th and incurring a balance that very same day, I was charged this fee. If I had known this, I would have waited and placed my order the next day on the 13th and since my balance is now settled before the 12th, I would not have incurred this charge. So I was charged a service fee for a matter of one day based on TFG’s cycle and not based on how long I had a balance open for (which would have been a few hours only). To make things worse, I called customer service for assistance and the agent was rude, she did not even acknowledge my issue and kept repeating a scripted response which was of no relevance to me and my specific query which I kept telling her and which she kept telling me even when I repeated the exact same thing to her and let her know that I am aware of what she is telling me but that is not what my query involves. It got extremely frustrating so I was forced to hang up for my own sanity. I decided to then email customer service in hopes that by writing out my concern, I could explain it better and someone would be able to understand my concern. I explained my situation in depth and asked if an exception could be made to waive this fee. The response I received made me feel like I was stupid due to the fact that I explained what the first customer service agent kept telling me about the cycle being the 12th to the 12th and that I understand this but that my query is regarding my individual situation but instead I received the same scripted generic response once again and then my query was closed. I responded asking for my response to be re opened and escalated to a supervisor or else to close my account. The agent one again responded with the very same response and did not escalate nor close my account and then closed the query again. As someone who has worked in customer service for an international company, I am appalled as we were never allowed to treat customers in this way and if a customer requests an escalation then we were obliged to escalate and not simply ignore the customer and close the query. Furthermore, there was always a means for a one time exception with the customer’s individual situation taken into account. To top it off, I received an email with a feedback survey which wouldn’t be necessary if queries were escalated as requested.