"I don't know my mother's name" or "CMS is filled with drooling idiots"

So I now work for a local Medicare Advantage Plan. Before January we hired nearly 50 people in preparation for Medicare Part D, many of them whose sole purpose is to answer the phones to assist our members - if someone who is not a member calls up we have to pass them on to salespeople - we’re not allowed to give insurance advice.

A few months ago we started getting strange calls. For one thing, they were all from a Georgia state area code, and we only cover parts of Oregon. For another, the people on the other side of the phone all seemed to be high.

Here is a particularly illustative example:

Me: Hello, CompanyName Advantage
Drooling Idiot (DI): Yes, I’d lke information on your Low Income Subsidy
Me: Are you a member of our plan? (I have to log every call from a member in our software)
DI: I’m not, but my mother is
Me: OK, could I have her name please?
DI: I don’t remember my mother’s name. I’ll have to call her. click
Me: ???

But it wasn’t just one call. Our call volume tripled from one day to the next. If you directly asked them who they were, they would either tell you that they were with a senior advocate group or they would just hang up. One DI even told me that she was calling on behalf of the seniors in her church.

At first we thought that it was someone trying for identify theft, but they never asked for private information. In fact they never asked specific questions at all. They would have a general inquiry, but when you asked them for specifics they would hang up.

So just recently we were sent a rating on customer service by CMS (the government entity that administrates Medicare). We were rated on the average length of time on hold, number of dropped calls, helpfulness and knowledgability of our staff, and several other areas.

Yes, CMS had hired these callers to test us. Of course it looked like we bombed. I went from about 100 calls/ day to over 40/hr. We have more than adequate staff for our actual members, but not enough for our members + an army of DIs. And yes, our customer service will be less helpful if it appears that you have the IQ of a cheesecake.

God, I love working with the government!

Susan, I am old and mentally infirm. I hope that your responses were clearer than your OP even though the callers themselves apparently did not make sense. Your second sentence is ver-r-r-r-ry long. Who is the “we” you speak of? Do the people on the phone work for you or are you on the phones?

What is a “DI”?

Sorry.

~Medicare Patient~

You service Oregon? And the callers seemed high? Are you sure you don’t have some scammers trying to get free medical marijuana?

Other kinds of DoS rely primarily on brute force, flooding the target with an overwhelming flux of packets, oversaturating its connection bandwidth or depleting the target’s system resources. Bandwidth-saturating floods rely on the attacker having higher bandwidth available than the victim; a common way of achieving this today is via Distributed Denial of Service, employing a botnet. Other floods may use specific packet types or connection requests to saturate finite resources by, for example, occupying the maximum number of open connections or filling the victim’s disk space with logs.

“my mother’s name? mama.”

i would be a great caller. wish i could get a job doing that.

Seemed perfectly clear to me. DI was the abbreviation that Susan was using for Drooling Idiot - however, it turned out that the drooling idiots were being paid to be such in order to test the quality of customer service that Susan’s team was providing. This effectively set the team up for failure as the DIs artificially inflated the call volume in addition to creating unsolvable problems for the service representatives because they were having to make up information for their test calls.

[total hijack]

I went to visit my great-grandmother in the hospital once and didn’t remember her room number. So I went to the information desk to get the info and realized that I didn’t remember her name either. I had to call my dad.

[/th]

Bingo.

Sorry if I was a little long-winded and unclear. I’ve been researching CMS regulations and memos all week and can feel myself fast approaching DI status as well. Maybe CMS hired normal people and made them read the plan sponsor manual before letting them call us.

The thing is, if they had just asked a specific question like “how much will a person with a Low Income Subsidy pay for prozac?” we would have answered them no problem. We get legit calls like that all the time from people who are trying to decide what plan to sign up with. We were never really strict about getting names for all of our callers until this incident.

But if they tested you like that, you might have passed! And that would mean they were bad at testing you.