If you want to do business with me...

2008-03-25 01:33 pm
mdlbear: (snark-map)
[personal profile] mdlbear

... your best bet is to provide a company web site that gives me the information I need, lets me bookmark it, gives me a form I can fill out to perform my transaction, and lets me bookmark that so I can come back to it if I get called away from my desk.

If you make me look for your phone number and call you, I'm going to start out irritated. If I get an answering machine, I'm not going to hang up, compose a coherent message, call back, and leave it. I'm going to get even more irritated, and call the next person up the food chain.

If that person calls me back (after a four day weekend that the company I work for does not celebrate) while I'm in a meeting asking if I really meant to do what I'd left clear instructions about doing, it would help if they call from a phone I can simply call back instead of having to parse their private number out of a message that gets delayed somewhere on my provider's voice mail system. And if I get another answering machine when I call them back...

I'm just saying.

  • Mood: grumpy
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Date: 2008-03-25 09:29 pm (UTC)
ext_3294: Tux (Default)
From: [identity profile] technoshaman.livejournal.com
/me wonders who this paragon of 21st century relations might be.... so he can avoid it.

Date: 2008-03-25 11:17 pm (UTC)
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
From: [personal profile] mdlbear
It's a life insurance company. Mass. Mutual, in particular.

Date: 2008-03-26 03:58 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] aerowolf.livejournal.com
To be fair, life insurance is one of those "heavily regulated" areas that seems to have a huge amount of confusion as to best-practice. However, they almost always require a full two-way conversation between agent and policyholder to make any changes, simply because our Great and Wonderful State Legislatures have decided that we don't have any clue what we're doing as customers and so we have no choice but to go through a middleman who's required to do certain things (like 'make sure we know what the potential consequences of our actions are'). (that, and they need to make sure that only the owners of the policies can take any actions to change the values of their policies, or even get information about the policies they hold.)

On top of the fact that insurance companies have fiduciary duties, and agents have fiduciary duties to both companies and policyholders.

Even more than banking, insurance would benefit from cryptographic authentication. It would make things a LOT easier for the clients, since the agents wouldn't have to worry about authenticating the messages.

I agree, they could handle it a lot better, though.

Date: 2008-03-26 04:35 am (UTC)
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
From: [personal profile] mdlbear
I was noticing that. The fact that one is supposed to go through an agent -- and in fact through a particular agent, who didn't answer his phone -- is a complicating factor that I hadn't really considered when I started the process. I ended up enraged where I might have been cynical and grimly amused.
Edited Date: 2008-03-26 04:35 am (UTC)

Date: 2008-03-25 10:07 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] randwolf.livejournal.com
One of my best online shopping experiences was with Motorola's on-line store. I was stunned. I mean, a cell phone marketer? But they took the order without fuss, explained the shipping options, notified me when they shipped, the item arrived on time.

Date: 2008-03-25 10:14 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com
One wonders if you were ordering a Rube Goldberg machine?

Date: 2008-03-25 11:16 pm (UTC)
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
From: [personal profile] mdlbear
Done that -- ThinkGeek is the kind of company I enjoy doing business with.
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