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Customer Service Rants
Dec. 8th, 2014 04:43 pmI’ve just had a couple of particularly awful customer service experiences.
Mom subscribed to several magazines. Some of those subscriptions were acquired using the last of her American Airlines miles (which she should have just paid to transfer to me, but she didn’t ask my opinion). You can’t get anything back if you cancel them, so I just changed the address on those. Another subscription was easy to cancel and returned the rest of the value of the magazines. But there is one who I can’t reach yet. Their customer service hours are 10-3 on Monday through Thursday. I found that out when I tried calling on Friday. Today, I was in meetings until 2:30. I tried calling and got put on hold and, after 10 minutes or so, they just hung up on me. That lasted all the way until 3. Aargh.
But her medigap coverage was even worse to deal with. There was one phone number on the bill. I called that number and got into phone tree hell. I must have gone through 70 levels of phone tree, including re-entering the first number I’d called. At one point, I got a person who asked me what number I wanted and connected me to yet another phone tree. When I finally did get through to a human being, it was at the wrong Blue Cross/Blue Shield. To be fair, that person did connect me with a human being at the correct one, but not until after arguing with me that I needed a different phone number. I wasted 40+ minutes on this crap, only to be told I didn’t need to do anything to disenroll her because that would be automatic when the bill wasn’t paid. Aargh, aargh.
Mom subscribed to several magazines. Some of those subscriptions were acquired using the last of her American Airlines miles (which she should have just paid to transfer to me, but she didn’t ask my opinion). You can’t get anything back if you cancel them, so I just changed the address on those. Another subscription was easy to cancel and returned the rest of the value of the magazines. But there is one who I can’t reach yet. Their customer service hours are 10-3 on Monday through Thursday. I found that out when I tried calling on Friday. Today, I was in meetings until 2:30. I tried calling and got put on hold and, after 10 minutes or so, they just hung up on me. That lasted all the way until 3. Aargh.
But her medigap coverage was even worse to deal with. There was one phone number on the bill. I called that number and got into phone tree hell. I must have gone through 70 levels of phone tree, including re-entering the first number I’d called. At one point, I got a person who asked me what number I wanted and connected me to yet another phone tree. When I finally did get through to a human being, it was at the wrong Blue Cross/Blue Shield. To be fair, that person did connect me with a human being at the correct one, but not until after arguing with me that I needed a different phone number. I wasted 40+ minutes on this crap, only to be told I didn’t need to do anything to disenroll her because that would be automatic when the bill wasn’t paid. Aargh, aargh.
