Netting It Out

How is the customer service you have been getting lately?

Our customer service should be better than ever, shouldn’t it? After all, the slackers and underperformers have all been laid off.  This should result in our getting better customer service than ever.

Sadly, the tale I am about tell is, I fear, more common than not. At the risk of painting with a broad brush, I must keep the parties involved unidentified for the simple reason I would prefer to avoid the rath of any Kafkaesque bureaucracy right now who could make my life miserable by losing a check, my paperwork, or my record.

You surely know what I mean by Kafkaesque bureaucracy. You know one when you see one: the company that is so very careful to not put any contact names on their website, no direct telephone numbers, no email addresses -  just a physical address a few states away.  The company may have an “800″ or “877″ telephone number that runs you through a seemingly interminable phone menu, that may or may not offer you the choice of speaking to a live person, and may or may not disconnect you at will, the cause never being clear or identified – or apparently fixed.

A company like this just relies on you to not know any better.

Sure the company has problems – it may be deskjockies or managers who don’t care, IT systems that don’t work the way they should, business processes that make no sense and require too many unnecessary pieces of paper.  Perhaps it is simply one of those companies who knows that you need them more than they need you, and so why do they need to bother to respond to you for?

It is not like you are actually going to be able to figure out what state their office is really located in; or, even if you could, then be able to identify or reach the state bureaucracy that is responsible for fielding complaints.

It is not like that state bureaucracy, even if you could find it, isn’t going to just take your story back to the company; and the company surely can turn this into a never-ending paper chase that is effectively a black hole.

Sure you can check Complaints Board or Ripoff Report, Scam.com,  or possibly Consumer Reports, or the Better Business Bureau.  Only the more enterprising and frustrated among us might even make our way to an attorney general’s office or an agency overseeing the insurance companies and benefits administration companies in the state.

But we all know how this goes, don’t we?

Too many times, the company seems to look first for the how to just make the problem go away (this time), rather than looking at your issue as an opportunity to both address your immediate dissatisfaction while also demonstrating their commitment and the capability to making your future relationship with them a thing to cherish. (Say what you will about T-Mobile; they have been among the best at exemplary customer service.)

So instead of the company taking the time to (1) understand what went wrong, (2) determining how to fix it now and forever, and (3) providing you with a sincere apology, and a satisfactory explanation of what went wrong and how they intend to fix it, as well as any additional consideration warranted – you get only form letter or an auto-reply email and a temporary fix to the problem.

Why do I bring all of this up?

As I am one of the millions  in transition, I am the fortunate recipient of COBRA benefits – for which my family and I am very thankful, let there be no mistake.

I received on January 6th a letter dated 7 weeks prior (on December 1st) informing me that my benefits are being transferred to Company X and Cobra Benefits administrator company Y.

• As of today, 2 weeks later, and 3 weeks into 2010, I still do not have medical benefits cards for me and my family.

• I have just been told – only because I asked – that the benefits administrator company Y decided to withhold my medical cards. No matter I do not owe them a payment, they have not told me I owe another payment, or that, in any case, there is a 30-day grace period; they just decided, without telling me, not to send any medical cards to me until I make another payment.

• But – they have not sent any payment coupons to me. They told me they were going to send coupons.  They have known since December 1st they had to send payment coupons to me.  And Company X told me they would.  But, then the promising is the easy part, isn’t it?  It is execution that is so darned difficult.  No one from Company X ever bothered to follow up to see if this really happened. And, No, I have yet to see any payment coupons from Company Y.

• In fact, my information was only entered into the Benefits Administrator’s system when I called up the Company X HR rep to ask why their instructions did not work.  Company X never followed up with Company Y, and so could not know that Company Y’s IT systems were not working correctly;  Company X – true to form – certainly was not about to proactively alert its customers that its faulty IT systems meant people were effectively with out working benefits for the preceding couple of weeks.

• So when Company Y finally had no choice but to confess their IT problems, they had me type into a support screen field the detail of the kinds of medical coverage I wanted, asking me to trust that they would put this right in manually for me.  Whoops – there’s that trust thing again – this was 2 weeks ago, and as of earlier today, my selections still were not fed to the insurance company.

Lessons from this:

• If you are a head of HR, particularly at a company that throws off tens of millions of cash every quarter, scrimping on the cost of a good Benefits Admin company is bad news for you.  You should probably be able to afford the extra people, if that’s what it takes, to make sure that the promises you make are being kept by other parties.

• If you are a head of HR, look beyond the Benefits Admin company’s prominent announcements of Six Sigma, and other awards. Are they willing to provide and to put onto their website, contact names, direct working phone numbers and direct email addresses for their customers? Does their “800″ or “877″ phone number work every time, and can you reliably connect to a live person on that number? If you and/or your benefits administrator is not willing to provide every customer with direct contact information for people at the Benefits Admin company – and to put this information prominently on the Benefit Admin company’s website – this should be huge ‘Red Flag’.

• If you are a head of HR, do not trust that an insurance company or Benefits Admin company is going to abide by the promises you make in a letter; you will need to make them abide to the letter of your letter, and to follow up to make sure that they are abiding by the promises you have made on their behalf.

• If you are a Benefits Administration company: If you are not willing to put contact names, working direct phone numbers AND direct email addresses on your website, and provide these to your customers, you are probably going to come to regret it.  Your customers expect this, and your failure to do so prominently signals one of two things:   Either your service is so bad (or worse, fraudulent) that you are unwilling to service your customers in this way – OR  your service, business processes, or customer service is so poor that you cannot manage the resulting phone calls and email traffic.  Ether way, it is not right to foist your self-inflicted wounds on your customers, and they, increasingly, will not accept it.

• If you are a Benefits Administration company, don’t even think of  trying to make up the rules as you go along, ignoring your promises on your website about the grace period or my next payment date, and decide to just not send out my medical cards to me without calling me.  Isn’t that one reason why you have my phone number?

It’s three weeks into 2010. If you cannot handle my benefits administration competently, then there are probably at least several among the 15 million unemployed who would be glad to give it a try.

Heck, we might be able to address the unemployment problem and reduce the amount of deplorable customer service at the same time.  Perhaps enough of us just need to say that customer service like this is just not acceptable.  Now, wouldn’t that be a nice Win-Win?

Thanks for listening.