Monthly Archives: April 2023

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Still waiting for Sunlife

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This is a follow- up to my “Staying in Business” post of last week.  Given how Sunlife was treating me, a long term customer, I wondered how they were staying in business.

Two weeks, still waiting

I began with my simple question on April 4th, after 3 failed chat attempts, one phone call with four cold transfers, 5 emails surprisingly all with responses which were sympathetic but provide no solutions, I am still waiting.

Also, I have requested assistance from the benefits plan owner (BMO HR) and they responded with an offer to help together with some follow-up questions.  That was a week ago and no further feedback from them.

Someone is “on it”

I have been told by Sunlife a senior case manager is looking into it but three business days have passed since I was told she was on the case, with no update.

Recently the Silicon Valley Bank had a run of customers leaving them, resulting in bankruptcy.  Hard to stay in business with no customers.  Sunlife, take note.

Simple Logic

My issue involves an underpayment of $3.07, which based on BMO’s published benefits guideline was clearly an error.  Based on my contacts and interactions with Sunlife their stonewalling response has cost them way more than $3.07 in labour and time, plus of course the customer alienation.

Logically, just making the correction and closing the query seems the only thing to make sense.  Yet, it drags on.  Wow.

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Trying out AI

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There has been a lot of buzz lately in the news and social media about advances in artificial intelligence.  In particular open AI has released a free to use (for now anyway) of their chat gpt product.

Not one to wait in the wings I created an account and decided to give chat gpt a whorl.

Testing the AI Bot

I am not a big chat user and basically focus on purpose based discussions with others, that is finding stuff out. So I decided to ask chat gpt technology based questions I had recently fielded to other support groups.

I was stunned.  The performance outclassed the human responses by   a significant margin.  Better than real people and self managed research like google search I am hooked.

Unemotional well thought out responses. were the norm, I tried several different approaches.  What was super impressive was when corrected the AI did not follow apart, apologized, clarified the correction and moved on.

I asked the bot a question Microsoft human support analysts avoided, ignored and refused to answer and got a straight answer finally.  Thank goodness, finally a straight up honest support option.

Corporate AI Text Support

Currently many companies supplement their onli e sales and service with a chat option.  My personal experience is the initial AI contact in these cases is just a useless barrier with you being quickly transferred to a human.

Based on my recent experience, I can hardly wait until these corporations transition to  AI of the quality of chat-GPT.  Frankly I got way better responses from that AI bot than any humans have every provided.

Go AI

It has been my experience that support and service for most North American companies is abysmal.  Here is a solution.  This is a technological change that brings clear significant improvement, although probably needs to be back-stopped by human supervisors.

I can hardly wait until the use of this type of AI becomes more univeral.

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Continuity Matters

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Recent experiences with various companies has really driven home how critical continuity of the message and actions is to provide basic acceptable levels of customer service.

Handoffs lead to Disconnects

In the past two weeks, interactions with four different companies (large and small) were all scarred at various points by because the transactions could not be completed without interacting with multiple individuals who were not in sync with each other.

The sad part is on the whole these experiences could have been totally satisfactory or even better had these unfortunate hand-offs not left a bad taste for something that overall was fine.

Coordinate and Confirm

The solution is simple. The principle should be a single point of contact for a customer to the greatest extent possible.

In cases where other expertise or skill focus is needed the transfer of the customer should always include all parties in the company (and the customer) to ensure a full understanding of what has incurred to date.

Just dropping the customers into someone else’s hands is a recipe for disaster.  Consistency in approach requires a “warm” handoff.

How We Doing

With longer service and support interactions, particularly those requiring some handoffs of the customer, pay attention to how things are going.

Confirm the customer is getting what they need at a minimum by asking them for feedback each time a transfer is made to someone else (always a warm transfer with everyone present at the beginning).

Avoid dumping the customer on someone else without confirming they are okay with bringing in additional support and be sure to consult internally beforehand to ensure continuity of message and avoid duplication.

Simple Approach Works Best

The suggestions made here can virtually always ensure success with every customer interaction.  Even if things don’t always proceed without glitches (shit happens) being sensitive to this and addressing issues collaboratively within your organization can make the overall experience for those you serve a positive one.

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Microsoft support is not very good

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Wow, no posts from me for 7 months and suddenly the muse is back.  Although it is certainly triggered by difficulties I am having getting simple things done through others.  I am trying hard though.

Microsoft Fails

This story requires a little bit of background about how email works. Hopefully you will find it interesting, the theme though is how Microsoft is unable to resolve what is relatively. a simple problem.

The background

When you send email from your desktop or mobile device it goes to a mail server associated with your email service (e.g hotmail, gmail, outlook).  This is the senders mail server.

Using a process called MTA (mail transfer agent) or SMTP relay (mail transfer protocol relay) the senders mail server searches the internet for the recipients mail server location, using the internets Domain Name Servers (DNS) .

The recipient can have more than one mail server listed in DNS, a primary and one or more backups.  The standard is for the MTA to select the recipients primary mail server first and only if it fails then the secondary or backup server is selected.

Microsoft Mail Server Behaves Like  SPAM server

The Microsoft mail server always selects the backup or lower priority recipients mail server first even if the primary server is live.  This is to avoid spam/junk mail filtering as typically the backup servers do not have such filtering in place (they are bare bones)

For major email service like Microsoft’s, this is a travesty.  They are supporting the delivery of spam and junk mail.  For comparison, gmail, yahoo, icloud and the majority of legitimate corporate mail servers use the primary mail server first when available.

 Like a brick wall

I tried repeatedly over numerous support tickets (more than 5) to get Microsoft to acknowledge and adjust this inappropriate mail server behaviour, to no avail.

I have since advised the Canadian Government Anti- Spam agency about this is issue.  Given it would have a world wide impact on reducing spam and junk email, I hope they take action but doubt anything will change

 

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Staying in Business

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Last week I had an amazingly bad customer service experience with Sunlife Financial.  It was probably the worst overall experience I have had with any company during my entire life.  Enough to make  me think I should to sell all my Sunlife shares.

A simple Question

The amount paid by my group medical drug claim plan administered by Sunlife, for a drug I have been taking for years, changed.  Not by much but you figure there has to be a reason.  The pharmacist (who auto processes the claims) had no idea but did indicate Sunlife had recently outsourced their group benefit claims processing to a third party, I should contact Sunlife.

My Incredible Journey

First I tried using Sunlife’s on-line chat to request an explanation, the AI transferred me to a service rep. who indicated they could not help and would transfer my chat.

The chat was dropped and I tried again, same steps, dropped again.  The third try I complained and the rep. stayed with the transfer till it was complete.  Unfortunately I was transferred to the wrong rep., they tried another transfer and of course, dropped again.

So I phoned.  After being transferred four  times, with my identity checked on each transfer, I got a service representative but in this case the title was an oxymoron as she refused to provide service, insisted I fax my receipt and they would get back to me in a couple of weeks.   I did this but have not heard anything yet.

Not Giving Up

So I tried a secure email, in which I pointed out the BMO group plan rules and how they had not been followed in the case.  My response (finally) explained how the calculation was done.  Although it was clearly in violation of the plan claim payment rules outlined in the BMO benefit booklet, this fact was ignored.

Keep on trying

So now I am following up with BMO the group plan holder.  My question, do you care Sunlfe is not following your stated benefit payment rules?  I guess it will be interesting to find out what happens next but I at this point I do not expect much.