Sorry, You Can’t Get the Discount
October 15, 2009
It’s good to encourage people to take action, but sometimes balance is important too. Back in July, our daughter had her tonsils out. And in case you’re conjuring up images of an adorable little child eating popsicles for a few days and then heading on back to kindergarten, let me clear this up for you quickly: our daughter is 18 years old, not five.
And let me assure you, a tonsillectemy is a much different experience when you’re 18. For starters, the pain level is much more intense, even more so when the patient has a low threshold of pain to begin with. Basically, two weeks of torture for everyone involved.
But she came through with flying colors, and the procedure was a success on all counts. I only wish I could say the same for the billing procedures of the surgery center.
Of course, our health insurance covered most of the costs for the ENT doctor, the anesthesiologist, and the day-surgery center, but, as usually is the case these days, we did have co-pays and deductibles to deal with.
We received the bill from the surgery center in September. (Apparently, it takes two months to get everything cleared through the insurance company – a separate problem all its own.) We put it in our stack of bills to be paid at the beginning of October, paid it as scheduled by check, and didn’t think about it again.
That is, until we got a second letter from the surgery center, informing us that if they received payment by October 15, they would give us a 20% early-payment discount. Mind you, they didn’t mention this in the original bill, nor was there any indication that you could pay by credit card, which, apparently, is allowed.
Thinking that this would be simple matter, Lorie called, explained how she had sent in the check, confirmed that they would have it by the 15th, and asked them to send us a check for the 20% early-payment amount.
No, they explained, they couldn’t do that. I won’t bore you with the complete details since you’ve almost certainly experienced the kind of bureaucratic incompetence that causes “customer service representatives” to adhere blindly to processes when pure common sense would dictate a different course of action.
Suffice it to say that Lorie held fast, spoke to not one, but two supervisors, and finally got it resolved. Not, by the way, that they would send us a check for the 20%, but that they would return the original check, and we would then resubmit the amount less the 20% payment, creating more work for both us and them!
I know, it didn’t make much sense to me either, but that’s kind of the point of this entire article: processes are good things. They make it easy to provide consistent service. They give you a starting point for improving procedures. But when the rules and guidelines people follow make things complicated for their customers or members, then it’s time to take another tack.
As difficult as it was to see our daughter suffer through the original recovery process, dealing with these people was almost as painful. Make sure you don’t do the same thing to your customers.
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Why is it so many employees can not think on their own? This brings up the topic of hiring the right team members to begin with. Heaven forebid that we ask someone to do something that is not writen in a notebook with a canned response. Here’s to employees that are able to wear multiple hats, and not one of those hats being a dunce cap!