Use Your Products

If your only healthcare need is to see your doctor on an annual basis, you should count your lucky stars. Friends of ours are dealing with medicare issues for their parents, which is an utter nightmare because the government would rather not be of help. Sad but true.

I have to interact with a division of United Healthcare every month because I have an autoimmune issue where I do not have enough antibodies in my blood to fight infections. More than likely, I have had this my entire life, but it accelerated post-menopause, hitting me for a loop that took four years to figure out.

Every month, someone comes to me and administers a drip of antibodies that takes a few hours to enter my system. Every month, I have to interact with United Healthcare (Optimum Infusion Pharmacy), which is always painful. I have to stay on top of getting the meds, making sure my appointment is booked, and paying for what the insurance company doesn’t cover. If sounds like a no-brainer but it is always frustrating.

The experience of working with Optimum has been abysmal. Their website is something out of the early 80s. They have scanned a piece of paper onto their site that is sent to me each month to pay. It took quite a while to get them to send the bill email every month. It is not easy to find the URL to pay, but once you do find it, you have to copy and paste the URL into a new tab. If you get to that step, there are other hidden steps to get their payment. More than likely the majority of their customers are over 60, and not tech savvy. So in order to get paid, they have a bunch of people dialing for dollars. It makes no sense.

I wrote a scathing review several times; I couldn’t help myself. Then the call came.

Last week, a call came in from Optimum with a VP of something telling me he had read my review. He wanted to understand why it was so bad. I explained to him precisely what I wrote above as the experience. Not only was he amazed, but he was also shocked that I knew who his customer was and how they were wasting money by dialing for dollars instead of building a seamless, one-click payment website. Then I asked him the most important question, have you gone through the process of trying to pay? Answer – no, I never have although it is such a good idea to do it. He told me he would have his team do it, not him mind you. He reports directly to the person who oversees the entire eastern side of this country for Optimum.

Multiple websites can be frustrating, and I often wonder if the people involved have tried searching, checking out, and finding items. We’re well aware that Gotham’s website needs a serious overhaul, and we’re working on it to determine the best customer journey, with the goal of providing a brand-new experience within the next two months. This guy has never even seen their website—classic big company mentality.

Bottom line: Use your products before talking to anyone outside the echo chamber of your own company.