My own mini-rant I almost forgot about. Snarl.
Good old @Saint_Cad started his own rant / congrats thread about a problem he was having with a bank and it turned out I had a completely analogous problem last week. I thought my story would be a hijack there in his thread, so I’ll put mine here instead. To wit:
I had a very similar flail late last week.
I have some insurance with MetLife. Which company is really the result of about 30 mergers and acquisitions over decades, so 30 ancient legacy IT systems that are loosely connected together by scotch tape and manual paper processes. All of which predate this new-fangled thing called “the internet”. I wonder if it’ll catch on? The website for that division of MetLife has exactly zero self-serve customer service capability. It is simply a web-based brochure hawking that division’s products. My, how 1990 of them.
Anyhow, they’re supposed to send a coverage verification letter annually. And they bill quarterly. Both by snail mail. When I moved a couple years ago I tried real hard to get telephone customer service to update my address everywhere, not just for billing. It seemed to work; I get some snail mail from them in addition to bills. For sure the bills arrive to the correct address right on time; they’ve got that much nailed.
Anyhow last week I realized that my last verification letter was about 18 months ago, not 6 like it should have been. Call them up: customer service is too swamped to talk to me, so after 30 minutes (!) of music on hold interrupted every 30 seconds to tell me my call is important to them, a human picks up to say she’s just a 3rd party answering service but she can take my callback number and a sentence or two about my problem and have a real C/S worker call me at a random unpredictable time within 2 business days. I say “yes” and give her my callback info.
How many years ago was it common for big corps to have a fully automated callback feature in their inbound call center voice/computer systems? 10? 15? Not this big famous company. My, how 2010 of them.
Sure enough, they call back at a not-very-convenient time 2 days later. At least this c/s worker is American and sounds intelligent / diligent. Hooray for small favors. After some go around about my address which she’s sure is correct everywhere, she starts typing for a minute or so then says, “Wait a minute; say your address one more time real slowly please.”
“123 E Fake Street apartment A-456”
“Oh, I see the problem. That system has your address as 123 E Fake Street apartment A-45” and the post office keeps returning our letters as undeliverable due to no such address. I see our systems have known about this problem ever since you moved and our mail to you has been being returned. But without your correct address we can’t send you a letter to tell you about the bad address, so we were stuck."
“Well, what about my correct address in your billing system for the last 2 years = 8 quarterly bills? Or the other systems that successfully send me snail mail?” “Oh, those systems don’t talk to these systems at all.” What about the fact you have my email address and telephone number. “Oh, customer service has no email capability at all. Not inbound, not outbound. Nor are we allowed to call customers; it’s all gotta be snail mail.”
My, how 1950s of them.
To think this worker almost forgot to go look in whichever obscure corner of their IT wasteland held my problem. Good bet I could have talked to 10 other c/s workers on 10 different tries and gotten no resolution. Lucky me.
And yes, I do now have a tickler task in my Outlook to call them promptly when the new letter she’s requested the relevant department to be special-issued to me doesn’t show up timely either. And another one for annually forever after on the relevant anniversary.
Can’t anybody there play this game?