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Excuse my English, i am not native English. I work at customer center for a health insurance company. Does that mean I, one tiny person, have any input into changing the policy that this giant health insurance company dictates? No. Does that mean customers try to change the policy to exactly fit their exact wishes, even though they chose to be customers of our company? Yes.
So this one guy calls, mind you, this is the last call of my day and easily the worst. He calls because at his pharmacy they “suddenly” changed his medicine to another supplier, its the same medicine, just another company made this. He already right of the bat tells me that he should be informed of this.(umm, why? you aren’t a doctor and its basically the same medicine?). I tell him, okay, i will go check out what is up and put him on hold, that i’m required to.
I look at his medicine and the pharmacy picked it for him because our medicine policy changed, we picked a cheaper supplier. We do this because then we don’t have to give these costs to him, the customer. It is insured. If the pharmacy gave him the other one, we had to actually charge him for it, this whole thing is like a policy of us and because of this, he doesn’t have to pay for it. Other health companies don’t operate like this and would always charge both medicines, it is essentially an **extra** service we provide so the customer can either not pay or pay for their preference medicine that is the same medicine but another supplier.
Do I like it that my company can just change the policy of what medicine is free or not? No. However they work with experts and the government to chose what is cheapest for us and for the customer, if the company wouldn’t do it, he would pay more for his montly payments and for his medicine.
Also interesting to know, if he has any bad side effects because of this medicine, which almost doesn’t happen, he can go to his doctor and get a presciption to his old medcine. He will have to pay more for it, but not the full thing.
So i come back and try to tell him all of this like i’m required to. Before i can even finished all that i mentioned above and finish informing him, he rudely interrupts “Woah woah woah” and is outraged that we “changed” his medicine (its the same medicine, different supplier), then he goes on a huge rant that his stomach is extra sensitive and he needs the right medicine. I couldn’t even tell him yet that he could get the old medicine and “how DARE we change him without informing him” (why didn’t he ask in the pharmacy as to why it changed? The pharmacist knows even more than i know about this whole ordeal). Then he goes on and on how we can just dictate his medicine and that we use him as a lab rat to whats cheapest to us and how dare we try to make money in this company… (because everyone knows how easy it is to have a business if you arent gonna care about money, right? /s )
Then he goes on that he wouldn’t have mind paying for the medicine instead, so i finally get to tell him that he can get his old one back easy, just go to ur doctor, piece of cake. You think he is happy to hear this? Nope, he goes again on the same rant how its unfair and then he goes into the “well why didn’t you inform me of this change?”, that’s when I’m starting to get annoyed so i told him “sir this policy could changes like every 3 months, we can’t inform every one of our millions of customers about every little change that applies to their situation, you can read our conditions on our site and you could have easily asked your pharmacist what changed too”.
He goes on his rant again: how dare we try to make money by picking another supplier of the same medicine, what if it might just give him horrible side effects or kill him or whatever…, how dare the company try to make money…. I kept thinking during this “Oh i’m sorry, I was not aware you are a pharmacist or a doctor” but that would be considered rude so i can’t say that obviously.
all during this whole ordeal i start weaning him off to the our complaint services, the people there can do much more than i can as customer services. As long as if it’s fair enough. The customers don’t realise that we from customer service cannot change policy, we can only inform of what is happening, ranting to us will not change what is happening to you, your only way to do within the company is through complaint services.
He never really replies to any of this, always straight up ignoring it, if i bring this up, going on and on about his rant. Now normally we have to give the customer 1 “warning” like “i can’t change this, so if this is all your questions…” and if they then only have the same problem that i can’t change, i can hang up on them. However this one boiled my blood so much that i kinda broke that rule by just saying “okay well i can’t change this situation and i already referred you to our complaint services, if everything is to clear to you, i wish you a nice day” and then straight up, clicked him away while he was still talking.
Woah was not expecting to tell such a long story, but yeah this was already on a bad day when i already got called an asshole by another customer and also been told i’ve been “customer unfriendly” by another. All i can do is inform the customer, if that information just happen to not contain what you want, then it isn’t my fault, i can’t change my answer, i don’t have that power.
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