How was your experience?

If you’d like to take a brief survey after this call, please press 1. How happy were you with our customer service representative’s handling of your issue? Please rate your experience on a scale of 1-5. I look and listen to all these prompts with a heavy sigh of frustration, not because the support experience was terrible or annoying, but because I don’t know how to mentally isolate the portion of the issue which was handled by that company from the larger picture at play, of which they typically have no control over. How can I be “satisfied” with an experience if all they did is explain their policy, which I entirely disagree with or have issues against for not being fair? As someone who currently works on support experiences, I have so many mixed emotions with all of this.

I recently went to a specialist provider (a cornea specialist) to get an eye condition looked at. They did a comprehensive eye exam and sent me a bill. It was a casual $800, and that’s after insurance. I called my insurance provider who explained that because I hadn’t hit my deductible yet, I’d be responsible for the full payment. They then told me to call the billing company to see if they could adjust the costs in any way. I called the billing company, who told me that they couldn’t do anything to adjust the cost because the provider had billed it with a specific code, and that I’d need to call the provider to get them to try and change the code. I called the provider’s office and they told me that they can’t change anything with the code and told me to call my insurance provider to see if there’s anything they can do on their end. Back to square one and a complete loop.

I got phone and email surveys from ALL these people. Every time, I just stared at it in confusion at how to “rate my experience.” Sure, the billing department provided me with clarity on why the cost is that high, but did that solve my problem? The receptionist at the provider’s office was super nice and chatty, but she couldn’t do anything about my actual issue. The insurance provider had a really good support website with an excellent user experience, but it didn’t solve my issue. So how do I even provide a rating here? Nobody solved my actual issue and no-one was able to answer why the cost for the visit was so high. My question was simple and straightforward: “This was a standard comprehensive eye exam. It’s a preventative wellness visit. Why is it being billed at $800?” After many back-and-forths and going in circles, I still have no idea why the cost is that high.

I cannot rate the “overall” experience here. And that’s what is at the core of many systemic problems today. I’ve written about how frustrating it is to not be able to solve systemic problems before, and the whole survey experience illustrates the problem so clearly. Every company or solution works in tandem with something else. A new startup shows up to eliminate the “middleman” from systems, linking databases from two different companies and providing an entirely new service. Great. But they have absolutely no control over the policies of those companies, how they choose to store information, what they do with the data, and what their end-user experience is like. At the end of the day, they haven’t solved any problem, they’ve just made it slightly more efficient at the expense of invisible and yet-to-be-seen experiential costs.

One of the latest 99% Invisible episodes features Roman Mars in conversation with Hank Green, and they definitely have a memorable discussion. Roman brought up the controversial introduction of the ergonomic and comfortable-to-hold “fat toothbrush” and how it caused a huge stir in the 1970s because the special tile in the bathrooms of that era that had built-in toothbrush holders couldn’t fit fat toothbrushes. The little openings were built for slim, sleek toothbrushes. Contractors and home buyers were up-in-arms about where and how they would store these fatter toothbrushes that were easier to hold and brush your teeth with but in turn required a different storage solution. Roman went on to say that any time a new invention or product has to interact with the built environment, it causes an interesting psychosocial clash in culture and society that’s very interesting to examine in hindsight. And it’s certainly true of every new product offering in technology today.

We know that the best way to succeed in today’s hyper-competitive tech landscape is to provide something that already works with some existing technology. Apple Pay and Google Pay hooked into NFC technology that already existed on people’s phones. Car chargers hooked into the “cigarette lighter” slot in a car, a feature that has long outlasted its original intent. Google Docs and Google Sheets recently added the ability to convert Microsoft Office documents into Google equivalents (and vice-versa). With all this cross-generational tech integration comes innovative solutions but also equally important problems. What happens when your phone NFC reader fails to process your payment? You’re left to figure out if the issue was with your card or the payment app or the NFC reader itself. You embark on a wild goose chase to contact support services for all three things trying to figure out what went wrong. And then you get asked to rate your experience for every interaction, even if your issue was ultimately unresolved.

The only solution here that makes sense to me is full integration. Apple builds the iPhone, provides the Apple Pay service, and even has their own Apple Card. When you use this stack with all systems from the same provider, it’s far more reliable. But even then, you’re frequently left talking to Apple Support with a very confused agent who can’t seem to reconcile what the exact issue is and only lives to provide unhelpful troubleshooting tips based on the company’s internal tech documentation of how to resolve common issues. Nevertheless, it’s far better to interact with one company rather than several different ones. At least you’re rating one “experience” rather than several different ones. Of course, the downside is that I’m essentially advocating for megacorporations here. Apple’s walled garden might be really convenient to exist in, but that’s what it is — a walled garden. Leaving it is extremely difficult once you come to grips with the patchwork of loosely held together systems that exist outside of that garden.

This is fine for tech companies, but what about larger systems like the healthcare example I brought up earlier? How on Earth do we begin to reconcile the colossal mountain of chaos that is America’s broken healthcare system? One company cannot possibly provide a specialist service, an insurance service, a billing service, a pharmacy, and support systems under one roof. In fact, it’s probably illegal to do so under many of our antiquated laws around healthcare. How do you deal with frustrating experiences in a space that cannot possibly be fixed without a massive overhaul of policy and laws? Given what we know about our government, any change here will be on the scale of decades. So what, just live with the annoyances until we’re so old that we either accept it as reality or no longer decide it’s worth caring about?

I don’t know what the solution there is, but I know it can be better than what we have today. Companies are only incentivized to care about the solutions they’re providing for a larger user problem. They’re a small speck of a big timeline of actions and events that real people experience. Even at Lyft, we ask for ratings after every ride. We ask how the agent did after a support interaction. The person providing the rating doesn’t look at their “Lyft” experience in isolation from the rest of their day. What if Lucy was on her way to a court to deal with a harsh lawsuit and called a Lyft to get there, only to have a driver cancel on her? What if she got to her destination on time after being dispatched to a different driver and then filed a support ticket and got a $5.00 refund but is still annoyed that she had to waste time doing that? What if the outcome of her lawsuit meeting wasn’t what she expected, and then she received an innocuous email from Lyft asking how her support experience was? She’s obviously upset, frustrated, and annoyed. What rating do you think she’ll provide for this service? I certainly wouldn’t be giving five stars.

The point is that people exist in a larger mesh of systems, products, and services that they’re all using to get things done. Asking for a rating of a specific thing in a very tiny sliver of that bigger timeline just doesn’t work. It’s difficult for people to mentally compartmentalize that very small interaction they had with the product and provide a rating just for that part of their day. It’s even more difficult for companies to get a proper gauge on how they’re doing in providing the service if the problem is with bigger systems. For example, I always tend to provide negative ratings for any interactions with a healthcare company because I’m usually so annoyed at the whole system rather than the company itself. How, then, can they hope to provide better services if the things that frustrate their customers is beyond their control and in a realm that they can’t possibly expand into due to legal constraints? I don’t have an answer to that, but I know the solution isn’t to continually keep asking their users how they did to provide a very small service for a very large problem.