It's time to re-order my prescription. Although I did not want to, I did re-order from drugstore.com; it was just easier or so I thought. The problems I had mentioned back in August have spread to drugstore.com itself.
I could make no progress with the web site so I telephoned the help line where I was connected to my friends at BioScrip. The fact that I was "first in queue with a wait time of less than one minute" turned into a four minute wait. Surprise! The BioScrip person I spoke to actually knew what she was doing and my order was filled with a few minutes. She was honest and acknowledged that three months after taking on drugstore.com as a customer BioScrip has problems. However, in this case I'd say the culprit was drugstore.com as its web site could not do the job.
Fallon Community Health Plan, our health insurer, provided another example of crappy customer service this week. On Monday I called with a question about a problem one of our employees was having with her policy. Despite the recorded voice stating it would respond as soon as possible, there was no response on Monday. And the same thing happened on Tuesday and Wednesday, my calls went unanswered. On Thursday the Fallon person was picking up her phone calls. We discussed the issue and she asked me to e-mail my concerns to her.
The response to my e-mail came later that day, as promised. Unfortunately, it was in the form of an encrypted e-mail. To read the e-mail, I had to supply my e-mail address and a password. Since I had never used this system and there was no way to register, I could not convince the e-mail to actually show itself in a way that I could understand. I sent an e-mail to my contact at Fallon explaining my problem.
On Friday morning I called and met the same "I'll call you back message". Later that morning I called the main number since I had not received a response. I was transferred to Member Grievances, which I would have thought would be populated with empathetic people. That assumption was smashed when a robot asked me to enter 1 or 2 or 3 for various options. What was Fallon thinking when they assigned a robot as the first person someone who had problems would "talk" with?
The supervisor of my contact could not be found. The president of Fallon was in a meeting. The person who might be able to handle my situation was on the 5th floor and the member grievance person, who was on the 9th floor, would have to walk to the 5th floor to ask that person to call me. Four hours later I had not eceived a call from Fallon.
Who pays the salaries of the Fallon president and his staff?
Do you think that maybe there might be a problem in this country in our ability to provide adequate customer service to the people paying the bills?
1 comment:
Research has shown a high percentage of businesses and organizations fail to realize that the impact of a poor customer service experience can lead to a drop in profits. By providing poor customer service negative word-of-mouth can spread very quickly in the community. I also heard a lot of bad customer service experience,.and that is really a mess!
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