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Reposted "the World According to Cosmos "(https://theworldaccordingtocosmos.com) SIgn-up! |
Cosmos's Customer Disservice Awards https://wp.me/p7NAzO-2BA An occasional series focusing on customer disservice which is rampant in America these days. More to follow as the mood hits me. Comments are welcomed including your customer disservice award nominees. We have three award winners this week. Great Clips for the worst online check-in reservation system I have ever seen; Oregon Bottle Drop for creating such a convoluted system to recycling bottles that discourages recycling because who wants to put up with hassle; and three to the Entire Insurance industry. Now on to the Disservice awards!, Great Clips' unhelpful online non-reservation check-in system Here are my comments which I will post today on Yelp, Trip Adviser, and on-site Bottom Line –the Great Clips online check system sucks big time. A total waste of time. Makes me wonder if their haircuts will suck too. Tried to get a simple haircut yesterday in Medford, Oregon. All the barber shops are filled and require a week’s reservation and the cost is 30 dollars. Drop-in is not welcome. Several companies claim to have an online reservation system. Great Clips company wins the award for the worst online application form ever designed. The idea was to let customers sign in before coming. Promising idea. Most such sites are 24/7 and allow you to make an appointment up to a week ahead of time allowing customers to schedule when it is convenient to come and providing providers with a schedule of appointments. It seems that the developers of this system did not know how to create an online appointment portal. It is not that difficult folks, many companies have done so, they all are available 24/7, and offer up to a week's appointment slots, and the latest ones are multi-lingual to boot! Nor did the clerk who recommended it have any idea that there is only a 15-minute window when the online check-in is online accepting same-day-only check-ins. To be fair, she was pleasant enough but just not that helpful in the end. But what they set up was a service that is only available during business hours and only allows you to check-in. As soon as you check it, the clock starts ticking. I wanted to go at 11 am. By the time I created the account and signed it was 10:15 and there was a 90-minute wait. There was no opportunity to change your reservation other than to cancel, which I did because I forgot to make it for two people. Nor could I create additional accounts for my family members or friends. When I created my account and tried to make a reservation, they somehow set me up at two different stores and I had to cancel both and re-submit it to get back in line. When I tried to log in again at 1020, they closed the online portal .and the estimated wait time was two hours. If you drop in the wait time is three hours. if you go and come back you will still have to wait as they do not have a sign-in sheet at the door, but you could wait for a no-show, which they said was common. There were only two customers waiting ahead of us and two getting haircuts. On the plus side, the cost was reasonable - 18 dollars with the senior citizen discount. They do offer to send you a text message reminder 15 minutes ahead of your time but only if you manage to get on their system in the 15 minutes it is open! Somehow, I do not believe that their text message reminder will work. Tip to the developers. Scrap this system and start over with a real appointment system that is available 24/7 in multiple languages. Or at the very least open it at 8 am for same-day check-in and perhaps allow people to check in for the next day. If you were to create a system to discourage people from using your services, this would be it. Who wants to wait three hours for a damn hair cut? and only be allowed to check in during a 15-minute window when the system falsely advertises easy online check-in. Sadly, just more corporate weasel word BS which is par for the course for most American companies who see workers as "labor units" and customers as troublesome creatures that you have to tolerate. And of course, there is no way to talk to a human being other than dropping by the store. This is the worst customer service app I have encountered in my 68 years on Earth. Kudos or something to the team that came up with this winning application! sent to Great Clips will add their response if they ever bother to respond. Bottle drop Oregon The second-place award goes to Bottle Drop Oregon which has designed such a convoluted difficult-to-use system that many people will just trash their bottles defeating the whole point of having a program in the first place. If you were to design a system to make people not recycle bottles the Oregon Bottle Drop Program would fit the bill. The old system was based on curbside pickup and voluntary drop-off at stores to pick up small amounts of cash deposits. The new system eliminated curb pickup and required a lot of bureaucratic hoops to go through including having to buy special bags, and stickers and haul your bottles to specified collection stations, and then wait a week to get paid. The adage, "if it ain't broke why fix it?" applies here. You have to create a bottle drop account to use the service. When you go to the site you cannot easily find the link to create an account, only a login screen. The Create an account screen is on a different website and I had to google that separately. It took forty minutes to sign in on the site and if it were properly configurated, it should take 10 minutes. Then I discovered that to use the service you must purchase green bags with stickers and your bottles in their green bags. You cannot simply bring the bags to their center in anything other than their bags. Then you have to haul it to their site where you place it into their machine which counts up the bottles and credits your account within seven days. You can redeem your account balances at participating stores that have a bottle drop Kiosk. Costco has one. So, in the name of efficiency, they replaced a simple customer-friendly system with an overly bureaucratic complicated system. The result will be many people will just put their bottles in the trash which will go to the dump. Because at 10 cents a bottle, it is not worth the hassle of going through their system which is designed to discourage bottle recycling. In short, Oregon Bottle Drop Company won the second-place award for the most unfriendly customer service product of the year. Kudos or something. sent to Oregon Bottle Drop and will add their response if they ever bother to respond. The entire insurance industry The third-place award goes to the entire insurance industry. The entire insurance industry is based on customer disservice. Here's my free verse poem on the insurance scam as my nomination form. Insurance is a scam They take your premiums Hoping that you will never Make a claim And when you do They will pay you Then jack up your rates Or cancel service Hoping to make Filing a claim As difficult as possible Discouraging people From ever filing a claim Just not worth it With the high deductibles They have an army Of claim adjusters Whose job is dependent On denying service And they deny service With impenetrable legalize jargon In fine print so small Or rapidly spoken verbal Disclaimers that no one can understand Only a lawyer Using a magnifying glass Or taping it and listening Many times Can read or understand the insurance statements. Medical insurance is denied By people Who have no medical background Auto insurance claims Denied by people Who are not mechanics The latest scam Bulk denials Forcing you to resubmit Paperwork No human being Reviews To get coverage You have to wait forever To reach a customer service AI bot To reach a human being Fuhgeddaboudit! PBS https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-algorithms... How algorithms are being used to deny health insurance … WebApr 2, 2023 · Federal data shows that health insurance companies denied more than 49 millions claims in 2021, but customers appealed less than 0.2 percent of them. Investigative journalists at ProPublica... • ProPublica https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx... How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject … • Pxdx • Speedy Reviews • “A Negative Customer Experience” • “It’s Not Good Medicine” • Cigna carefully tracks how many patientclaims its medical directors handle each month. Twelve times a year, medical directors receive a scorecard in the form of a spreadsheet that shows just how fast they have cleared PXDX cases. Dopke, the doctor who turned down van Terheyden, rejected 121,000 claims in the first two months of 2022, according to ... See more on propublica.org the end |
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