For members of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, there was good news and bad news recently. The good news: It turns out that the Bay State’s largest health insurance company can provide quick, effective, and highly responsive service — often with same-day turnaround — to members who call with a request or complaint about their medical coverage. The bad news: That excellent customer service is available for just one week of the year.
As the Globe’s Robert Weisman reported late last month, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts supplied its customer-service staff with special scripts and procedures to be followed from Oct. 15 to Oct. 19. For those five days only, customers calling for help with an insurance issue — calculating a co-pay, fixing a billing error, getting a claim adjusted — were treated to fast, consumer-friendly assistance by agents trained to get problems resolved speedily.
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Tried calling Blue Cross to ask about a claim the other day. All I got was bounced around its stupid automated phone system - no way to find a real human being to actually TALK to about an issue. The company is happy to take your money, make you pay co-payments you don't understand, and then refuse to have an ACTUAL PERSON answer the phone. Some customer service.
Express Scripts customer service epitomizes anti-customer service. When you call, you have to deal with a menu that prompts you to enter information (ex: date of birth, etc.) and when you finally reach a live person, they ask you for the same information again! I asked what was going on. Answer: it's a glitch. Well, my experience shows that the glitch has been institutionalized. On occasions, they ask you if you want them to call your physician to secure a new prescription. Wondeful, right? Well sometimes they don't. As a result you ran out of meds and you end up going to go to a local pharmacy and get fewer pills for more money -you can't get the 3-month supply and it takes ES 14 days to ship you the meds. But at the end of each call they consistently give you a reference number. I don't bother writing it down. You know that BCBS will manage to screw it up.