I received several texts today on my personal phone number addressed to a minor child in my household for whom I provide health insurance from Kaiser.
- I opted out of Kaiser text message communications. They don’t respect it because Marketing?
- The messages are addressing a minor child, yet sent to me, the adult. Kaiser would know their age. If they’re young, directly texting them is a violation of parental consent. If they’re a dependent there could be all kinds of privacy concerns for say a teen who maybe doesn’t want their parents to be involved in such conversations.
- I went to Kaiser’s website to make a complaint. They don’t provide an e-mail contact so you have to use a web submission form. Attachments (e.g. screenshots) aren’t allowed. I copied in the text of the text messages after noting my concerns above and tried to submit. The web form said “unsupported characters”, which I then spent 30 minutes trying to guess which of the characters from the texts they sent me might be unsupported by their website.
- I decided to call their web support to find out which characters were unsupported, I’m sure I wasn’t the first person to have the issue. They asked for personal identifying information that isn’t necessary to provide website support, spent 5 minutes locating my account, and then told me they’d have to transfer me to a different region as they don’t support my region.
- They transferred me and I received an audio notice that the region was experiencing technical difficulties and the call disconnected.
- I went back to the web form to open a complaint about their web form and submitted it suggesting they identify which characters are not permitted. The form also is about 3 lines of text high but accepts 1,000 characters which makes it very difficult to read as the web user (I’m sure a dark pattern to reduce form submission)
- I called support again to try to reengage them to find out if they could identify the characters so I could submit the ticket myself. I got a different agent and had to tell them my original complaint and then what had just happened. They said they didn’t know which characters were permissible, that my regions support shouldn’t be down as they had no alerts, and wouldn’t be able to find out which characters the form could use, despite being web support. They said they could take my complaint over the phone.
- I asked what else they needed to make the complaint. The woman said just a minute and pulled up a form after talking to a colleague and asked me to start from the beginning to make my compliant. I hung up.
- I went back on the website, typed out the entirety of the text messages I had received, my concern and the form allowed me to submit. The text messages must have had a hidden character or space that wasn’t visible to me when copying/pasting.
Now I wait to hear back on my two complaints. All so that, after furiously and competently struggling against the machine, I get back to a place where maybe if I’m lucky they will respect my communication preferences, not contact my child without my permission, potentially fix their shit website, which would leave me maybe about as good off as I was before I was aware of these issues.
I feel like Calvin at the bottom of the big snowball hill he and Hobbes used, only in the modern US it’s a shit snowball and it’s full of companies who are technologically incompetent and aren’t incentivized to follow even the laws they likely helped shaped through lobbying. The above issue is hardly even bad compared to other situations I or others have been through, it’s the routiniety of it that is so dystopian.
Edit: 10. IT support responded to my ticket tonight. They didn’t read the complaint and provided boilerplate AI template responses on how to submit a ticket when logged in as a customer.They also provided instructions on how to take a screenshot and asked me to respond to their e-mail and attach it so they could review. I responded telling them I didn’t need instructions on how to take a screenshot or how to submit a message, that was included in my ticket which they didn’t read–I needed a functional communication system, and reviewing the above points and then attached screenshots. I received an automated response almost instantly from their system that I had responded to a ticket that had already been closed and that Kaiser hoped they had resolved the issue to my satisfaction. No ability to re-open the ticket, no contact e-mail or phone number to continue to try to resolve the issue.
The issue with the web form not working sounds like something that fucked up when I tried to report an issue to my city government. I concluded it’s a deliberate attempt to prevent citizens from creating work for them and gave up. But it’s equally likely that it’s incompetence.
The size of the text box on the “complaint” form tells you all you need to know. Barely visible on a page, limited to 1,000 characters, odd character restrictions with no instructions, no attachments—they aren’t trying to facilitate resolution, they’re trying to minimize contact. Also, this is after I signed into my account, so this is their “member only portal” where they nice explain they don’t accept e-mail for HIPAA reasons…but their substitute is a deliberate farce.
You sound like me any time I have to get support from anywhere. I don’t often need support, but when I do it’s always crazy stuff like this that irks me.
In the rare case you do find an email address it oftentimes just goes to some ticketing software that no one can be bothered to care about.
Most recently I emailed my bank’s support because when I try to switch my debit card’s checking account (something they do) I just got an HTTP 500. Four days later I get boilerplate about “how to switch your card’s spending account.”
That’s no boilerplate, that’s “AI”™!
You’re probably right 😞
