The other day I had an issue involving a new health insurance company I’ve switched to.
I managed to handle most of the registration process online, but had one issue the company’s website didn’t address. It had a Frequently Asked Questions page, but the info I needed wasn’t listed. After ten minutes of groping around in cyberspace, I finally found a customer support number and called.
This is always a last resort, because I know what’s coming. A bot will tell me my call is very important, then make me go through a series of options, none of which address the reason I’m calling. Very early on, I’ll start saying “agent” or “representative” or “let me speak to a human!” Sometimes that works, other times the bot demands I provide the reason for my call so I “can be routed to the appropriate customer support department.”
In this case, I spent the next hour being passed from one person to another, becoming hopeful I’d been transferred to the correct extension and the next human would solve my problem. Instead, I had to contend with a slew of people who offered exactly no help.
Each time, I was put on hold for two or three minutes and forced to listen to the generic on-hold music library every corporation uses. You know what I’m talking about. The tuneless riffs that pause every once in a while — and never at a natural break in the song — for a second of silence, during which I get a little excited that someone’s picked up my call.
But no, it’s just the “your call is important to us” reminder and then back to the damn music. Or a recorded claim there’s help available on the website, and for even more assistance, there’s a chat bot that will answer questions.
No, it won’t, unless your question is in its database. Artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly, but these companies aren’t updating their software, so we’re left to deal with their not-so-intelligent version 1.0. The result is a panoply of chat bots that can’t yet offer solutions for matters they haven’t been programmed to respond to — like the issue I was calling the insurance company about.
When I finally was connected to a seventh person, she seemed like she understood my problem and really wanted to help. But then came the dreaded “I’ll have to put you on hold while I get approval from my supervisor,” and I knew I was doomed. Sure enough, it was quickly apparent the call had ended. I don’t know if she actually spoke to a supervisor and was told to drop me, or if it happened by accident, but I had no way to get back to her without going through the entire process again from scratch.
It’s become clear to me over the years that systems like this are built by people who never have to use them. I’d like to meet just one of them and force them to sit on hold with that goddamn music and the promise of assistance that’s always just out of reach. If they had to run the gauntlet of ineffectiveness they offer the public, perhaps they’d recognize the need to make things easier and more responsive.
This lack of service is not a new phenomenon.
Twenty years ago, I had a guest on my radio show named Laura Penny, who wrote a book, “Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit.” She saw phoniness everywhere (“a fog of fibs”) from voice mail hell to Big Pharma to TV news to, naturally, politics. Until talking to Laura, I didn’t know that American businesses have been outsourcing their call centers not just to India, but also to prisons here in the US — thus cutting out the middleman in the identity theft problem and having us give our info directly to criminals! You can listen to our conversation here.