I normally try not to rant online too much as it is really pointless and generally counterproductive. We have all experienced poor customer service, long waits and rude representatives, but at times certain behavior exceeds all stupidity. This is one of those times.
Today, at 12:30 PM I have tried to log into an Aetna account and wasn’t able to so. The login fields are visible and available on their homepage, but once the info is inputted, I would be transferred to the above displayed page. Now, 12:30 pm GMT-5 (or EST if you prefer) is right in the middle of a work day here on east coast; it is also 9:30 AM GMT-8 (or PST) on west coast (meaning people are already at work) and even if you were somewhere in Europe, London for example it would be 5:30 PM GMT(0) which also means that people would need to have access to their system during that time.
Dealing with servers, databases and web front ends myself I can appreciate that at times things happen and go wrong without notice, but the way this situation is handled is what makes it bad and a bit surprising for a company of that size. Even now, an hour later, there is no update on their site informing clients that the system is inaccessible; the login fields are still visible (even though they don’t let you login) and their tech support sucks! I called them as instructed by their page and was given an attitude and nonsense answers.
Here’s a brief exchange I had with one of their techs/customer disservice reps:
Me: I can’t login to my account on your website and was instructed to call you.
Tech: Yes, the system is updating itself.
Me: Updating itself, as in on its own, just decided to do so in the middle of a business day?
Tech: Yes. It’s strange, it normally doesn’t do this, but I guess it decided to pick a different time today.
Me: So your system is not experiencing any technical difficulties, it simply decided to update itself?
Tech: Yeah, I know it’s weird, but nothing we can do about it, it just started updating itself.
At this point, I’m clear that I’m dealing with a moron, but have decided to ask another question or two. Btw, she was dead serious while providing those answers.
Me: Do you know how long it will take for it to update itself?
Tech: It normally takes anywhere from an hour to two, but not sure. Try logging in in a couple of hours and if it doesn’t work I guess it’s not done yet.
Me: Thanks! You might want to post a note on you site informing visitors of this change.
Tech: Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
Me: No, thanks! You have done enough already.
Tech: I’m glad I was able to help you. Have a great day.
Furthermore, besides the technical “expertise” I’m starting to wonder what kind of system are medical records and personal information stored on if they can’t provide something as simple as a failover or any kind of redundancy for their customer information system.
I still have to call them back, but I refuse to do so just yet, I need some more “down time” first. 😉
Comments 2
Let me see. The back end is an ancient legacy system written in/for PICK which is emulated on a dusty Linux server running an outdated version of Red Hat. The front end is written in ASP.NET and is running on an IIS server. The communication between the PICK back end and .NET front end is facilitated by mess of old VBA scripts which open socket connections and send telnet commands over the network, and then screen-scrape for output. 🙂 And yes, stuff like that exists and is still used today.
Alternatively the back end is written in MUMPS.
I mean it is just a guess based on what I have seen running out there in the wild. Medical field is an… odd place when comes to software development. It may carry over to medical insurance field as well.
Author
🙂 hahahaha…it is scary how real and accurate your description is (or at least could be) for some of these places. It also shows how much they really don’t know about technology or simply don’t care for it. I’m sure that somewhere in each of these companies there’s at least one IT Pro ripping his hair out over production implementations, but the people in charge just don’t get it.