Because I'm in the midst of moving from California to the East Coast to be nearer to my daughters and my siblings, I've been canceling service with various companies. One handled a question horribly — and I think offers lessons for insurers, both in general terms and in terms of how they integrate chatbots into their service operations.
So I'll tell the story here, then suggest an exercise that can keep executives from falling into the most common traps.
Because my problem wasn't with an insurance company — Xfinity is the villain here — I don't even need to pretend to be polite.
Here goes.
Some weeks ago, I canceled service with Xfinity as of May 14 but recently got a bill for service through June 3. The bill was $150 or so more than it should have been, so I went to the website and began a chat to find out what was going on. Xfinity has nickeled and dimed me in the past and generally been hard to deal with, so I was prepared to believe they had just missed my cancellation notice.
I quickly made it past the chatbot and got to a human, who took a long, long time to dig into my bill and then gave me what turned out to be a very wrong answer. The person told me my cancellation hadn't been recognized because I hadn't provided a "verbal confirmation."
That made no sense. I had spoken with a representative on the phone, had told the person I wanted to cancel and had received confirmation. But the rep on the other end of the chat wouldn't budge.
The rep said they could have someone call me to get that confirmation, but before that could happen the chat dropped. I tried to reinitiate but got several error messages from Xfinity telling me to try later. When I finally reconnected, the new rep offered the same nonsensical "verbal confirmation" line and said I had to call the main service number.
I did so and got a recorded message about some sort of issue about billing for new channels that apparently lots of people were calling about but that had nothing to do with me. After maybe a minute, the message said I could hold for a representative. I held. No representative. Instead, the recorded message started again. At the end, I held again. Still no rep. Just the recording again. I waited a third time. No rep appeared. I hung up and tried again. Same deal. I phoned again. Same thing.
Finally, a rep from Xfinity called me — apparently, that first online rep had managed to initiate a call before our chat dropped; Xfinity just took half an hour to make the call. The rep calling me needed only a few seconds to diagnose the actual problem. Xfinity had registered my cancellation, but its information systems couldn't see the halt when it generated the bill at the beginning of the month. I should rest assured, though, that Xfinity would later adjust the bill based on my days of actual usage before hitting my bank account.
Fine, but... the rep blamed me for not understanding the intricacies of Xfinity's (brain dead) approach to billing, rather than acknowledging that Xfinity should have at least told me at the top of the final bill that it would prorate the charges for May. Nor would she acknowledge that her colleagues at the online chat shouldn't have led me on a wild goose chase based on bad information.
In her harsh New York accent, she kept saying things like, "I'm sorry you didn't understand, but we've been billing you early in the month for years, so you really should have expected a bill from us."
Yes, I expected a bill from you. I just expected it to be correct. Silly me.
I never did get any satisfaction from her. She and Xfinity were in the right, and I was just a dumb customer.
The house I'm moving into this week is serviced by Xfinity. Guess who won't be signing up with them.
But setting my obvious frustration aside, I think Xfinity made some core strategic mistakes about customer service and believe some in the industry are making the same ones, or at least will be tempted to as the industry adopts more chatbots.
Just about every company these days, certainly those in insurance, talks about wanting to be "customer-centric," a truly ugly term that is hard to define in operational terms (a point Alan Demers and Stephen Applebaum address in their excellent piece on empathy that is one of the six articles I've highlighted this week). Companies may track whether an issue was handled on the first try, a valid concern for any customer, but typically mix in efficiency goals that complicate life for the customer.
In my case, Xfinity was clearly trying hard to reduce the number of phone calls that get through to live agents. That's why it steered me toward the chat in the first place, and that's why they posted the long message about a billing issue that they made everyone listen to before they could even request an agent. (I hit "0" and said "agent" or "representative" any number of times with no result.) Who knows, Xfinity may have even deliberately kept the message on repeat to frustrate customers into dropping the call.
I'm all for efficiency, but those goals have to be kept separate from goals to keep customers happy and serve them better. Xfinity should have offered an easy handoff from the chat to a live call with an agent, once I hit a dead end online. The handoff should never be: Call the main number.
I suspect Xfinity has a silo problem. Its chatbot and live online agents worked together smoothly — the chatbot really just served as a simple front end to direct inquiries to the right sort of live agent — but weren't at all integrated with the agents reachable via phone. The agent I spoke with on the phone had much more experience, likely more training and seemingly even access to more information than the online agents had. It's as though the online functions were grafted onto an existing call center organization but never really integrated.
Xfinity certainly has a problem with the agent on the phone. She's fallen into the trap that can come with expertise. She knows everything about what she's discussing, and, if you don't, too, then you're deficient. She also seemed excessively defensive about her employer, which can come with long service. And she'd lost the good grace that would have at least tried to hide from me her low opinion of my knowledge about Xfinity's billing systems.
Assuming what she told me is accurate, Xfinity also has an IT problem. It boggles my mind that its systems generated a bill for me on May 3, unable to see that I had called weeks earlier to cancel service as of the 14th.
I imagine many insurers also have a silo problem, perhaps an even bigger one than Xfinity has, because insurers may sell many different lines and have traditionally organized data by business group. To truly serve customers, insurers need to make sure data about them is integrated so that anyone interacting with them — whether online, in a call center or in an agency or brokerage — can see the whole picture.
Insurers also need to watch out for the problems that come with expertise. I can't imagine any insurer's rep being as rude as the Xfinity rep was, but insurance is a complicated product, and those who sell and service it know an awful lot more than customers do, so there's a lot of potential for miscommunication.
The good news is that generative AI will help with some of these problems. It's really good at assembling information, so it can pick and pull from different information systems to provide a deep, integrated picture of a customer and perhaps avoid the kind of mistake that Xfinity's online service function made with me.
Generative AI can also produce communications that provide an even, appropriate tone, heading off the sort of rogue behavior that the Xfinity phone rep showed with me.
But insurers will need to be careful as they rely more on AI chatbots, to make sure that they're fully integrated with the other aspects of customer service and that all handoffs are smooth.
Beyond those general cautions, I recommend an exercise that comes from the Silicon Valley dictum that "You have to eat your own dog food." In other words, don't just get reports about metrics on your customer service. Experience it.
You obviously aren't going to file claims or apply for policies to see how you're handled. But you can latch on to perhaps one customer a month and follow them from start to finish.
If you're involved in supervising customer service in any way, get notified when someone first makes contact with your organization, whether you're with a carrier, a TPA or other service provider, or an agency or brokerage. Then get notified every time your organization contacts them or they contact you. Read every email, text or letter. Listen to every call that's recorded. And do it in as close to real time as you can, so you wait with the customer for that week or two or three before something happens. You'll get a sense of what frustrates customers, both with your organization and with others that are part of the process, and can perhaps improve how you do things. If nothing else, you'll be more empathetic.
I hope you learn some useful things. In the meantime, I'll let you know if Xfinity really does prorate my May charges. I'm not betting on it.
Cheers,
Paul