Meeting many friendly people

The way companies deal with phone inquiries has become a differentiation claimed in advertising. The ads mostly distinguish automated answering systems versus real people taking the call. I do believe that this is an area of application where artificial intelligence will eventually gain traction in the future since the scope of the activities and their repetitiveness lends itself to that. Still even a person driven system can have interesting side effects. Today over the course of approximately 90 minutes I met a whole bunch of very friendly people: Jenny, Ivy, Alberta, Jamal, Abby, Christina and finally Robert. The purpose of my call was to inquire about an out of network pre-treatment authorization and the ladies and gentlemen listed above represented the membership office and the physical therapy coordination departments respectively. All of them told me that they were looking into my records, tried to understand what I was asking for and looked to find an open process that would match with my inquiry and that could be triaged. Since I had to tell my story seven times along the way I tried to adjust it based on their questions and tried to use the terms they were using in their follow-up questions – hoping that it would become easier to find my request and to give me a status update. Ultimately six of the seven conversations ended with the friendly person giving up their pursuit on the health insurance computer system after some time trying and declaring that the “other” department needed to attend to that. The conversations had significant entertainment pauses when I was on hold waiting for the next person listening to various music tunes. While I grew somewhat frustrated along the way as I was looping through the same departments – I tried to not be impatient – firstly since each time a different person came onto the phone who had no insight into my journey up to this point and secondly since in all cases these new people were cheerful and intended to be helpful. I think I succeeded. Robert was the seventh person – he was taking the call from his home office in Colorado of all places. He pretty quickly came to the conclusion that my pre-authorization request actually had never made it into their system! (Note: I used the phone option two weeks prior for placing it with a membership representative). So, he offered to put a new one in for me. Along the way I was still briefly at risk of another referral to the membership department – it had to do with the coverage of my plan that by his assessment was supposed to allow me to schedule directly out of network, and he suggested to ask a membership representative to verify that coverage. But here I managed to persuade him to file the request first – using a convincing tone rather than an impatient one.  He did and by doing so prevented me from the eights loop through the system. I am sure I would have met more friendly people along the way but my “speed dating” capacity was reached for the day. We had a good conversation still – turns out we worked for the same company at one point in our lives out East and had common acquaintances.
(Closing note: My request was ultimately declined – a member of the physical therapy coordination department called me to explain and offer alternatives – another very friendly person – and a subsequent follow-up letter confirmed the decision).