My Experience with VISA Platinum Concierge Part II

After my initial experience with the VISA Platinum Concierge I was eagerly awaiting the response from them after attempting to book my Bruno Mars tickets.

Well, sure enough about 20mins after ticket sales opened on Tuesday I received the following email from the VISA concierge.

I have to say I was pretty blown away, it really was a fantastic experience, the VISA concierge did all the heavy lifting and saved me from dealing with the Ticketek site grinding to a halt as everyone in Australia tried to buy tickets to the last show.

What I didn't like about the service

Whilst overall I was really impressed with the VISA concierge, the whole system seems to basically be a manually turk process based. There were a couple of things that I found very odd.

  1. They needed all my Credit Card Details - So despite it being a VISA service, they required me to provide my credit card number, expiry and CVC number. Which no doubt was typed into some ticket system that was then used to process orders. Now the thing is I am pretty sure this must have been stored in plain text or reversible encryption as they would have needed to read all this information to process the order (see next point below). This is questionably breaking PCI compliance rules.

  2. Despite VISA having a partnership with Ticketek, to process the order they needed my Ticketek username and password. As they essentially were going to log in as me and order the tickets. Now I initially flinched at this as the concept of providing usernames and passwords (that again no doubt were being stored as plain text in some ticketing system) is not something I agree with. However considering it was just Ticketek, I changed my password whilst I was on the phone to the VISA concierge and provided them with a temporary password, which I have since changed again.

So in one way I am very impressed by the whole process as it was effiecient and delivered the right customer expereince, but on the other hand I am not sure I really agree with how they execute this, surely VISA can arrange a better partnership with the ticketing companies.