Today's challenge: Is customer service a thing of the past?

By Stephanie Cohen, CEO, Golden & Cohen

 

As a regular new addition to our Golden & Cohen blog, I'm planning to write about the situations, crises, and challenges that I experience regularly, which, quite honestly, leave me scratching my head. One that happened just last week falls under the heading, "So this is what they call good customer service?"

 

A client's Health Reimbursement Arrangement (HRA) was up for renewal. (For those new to this health insurance product, and HRA is offered in conjunction with a high-deductible health plan, and can be funded by the employer for each participating employee. It pays for the deductible and other medical expenses typically covered under the medical plan. Unused funds can be carried over to the next year to cover future health care expenses, an incentive to employees to use their personal HRA wisely. If funds are exhausted, the employee is responsible for satisfying the remaining deductible before the plan begins to pay. If the employee changes jobs, the money stays with the employer.)

 

In this case, the deductible was $1000 per employee for the last year, but because of the lagging economy the company wanted to increase its per person deductible to $1500. 

 

You'd think this would be a simple adjustment, but in fact the insurance carrier who was administering the HRA countered saying that the company could make the change — but they wouldn't have access to the insurance companies administration as this product does not have access to the administrator. 

 

This was unacceptable, of course, because that meant that someone else would need to handle the administration of the hundreds of people covered under this plan. As the broker the likely candidate would have been our company. Certainly, that is an expense that we did not want to incur, but more importantly it didn't seem right that the insurance company would still be making incredible amounts of money and not want to be responsible for any costs associated with managing the customer's employees. 

 

Fortunately, I was able to get a waiver and for this year and got the insurance company to agree to continue administering the plan, at least, the insurance company will be covering the administrative fees associated with this account. 

 

But the situation leaves me asking this question: Is the concept of customer service, not even good service but service at all, going to be a thing of the past?