Oh wow. Blue Cross hosed that?

Max Out of Pocket: This is the yearly maximum accumulation that an insured individual must pay before the insurer takes on full financial responsibility for subsequent claims. This comes in generally one of two flavors: a family or individual.

The individual is straightforward. If you have a MOOP of $1000, and you've paid out $1000 in copays or coinsurance after meeting your deductible on just you, you no longer owe any contribution on claims for you, for that year. However, someone else in your family on your insurance will have to have their copays/coinsurance paid until either their individual MOOP is hit, or between the two of you you accunulate enough for the family MOOP to kick in, which depending on the nature of the plan, will start covering expenses for everyone else in the family unit.

Out_of_pocket_max is likely the individual MOOP. Max_out_of_pocket_max is probably a terribly named family or Group MOOP. These should not be confused with policy or lifetime maximums, which are caps to the amount of a specific benefit the insurer is willing to pay out for you as an individual period.

I know for a fact places screw that all up. I spend a large chunk of time making sure things like that do not stick around.

This sounds exactly like my kids school district. They send an email telling you you have a "secure message" and you need to log in to see it. So you try to sign up to see the message, but can't because you don't have the password. So you try calling them and they say they will reply via email. What they mean is that they will send you a secure message about your inability to receive secure messages. So you call again and they transfer you to a number that is only open between 9am and 4pm on weekdays. So you call back on Monday and, because this is the start of term, can't get through, like, at all, ever. So eventually on Wednesday you get through and they transfer you again, only this time you manage to invoke XKCD 806 and get a real person who knows how to "reset" the password you never set in the first place. So you finally manage to log in to the secure messaging portal and look at the email. Oh, it's a PDF download. You download the PDF and see it's a physical letter that has been scanned in to the system manually (seriously!). The letter? The reason you went to all this trouble? It's a welcome letter to the new "secure messaging" platform, with instructions about how to reset your password...

Generally, anything not-for-profit and older than 40 years is a technological shit-show.

There's neither the individual or management will to successfully migrate or upgrade at the pace required. Consequently, everything is held together with duct tape and person-hours.

I heard somewhere that telegraph is a legitimate form of communication for some official routes - unless they aren't specifically prohibited. Has anyone tried this? I would reallt like to force my bank to respond to my telegraphs... or pony express letters

> get treated by the wrong doctor at the right hospital!

In California, this shouldn't happen. If you go to an in-network hospital, all care providers you see are required to bill you at the in-network rate.

A short conversation with Medicare:

Never happened. They never pick up the phone, and they don't have any other way to contact them after you applied for benefits. I tried for weeks to resolve an issue with an application for my father, a dozen of calls, every time being on hold for hours. Sometimes the automated system says "leave your number and someone will call you back tomorrow at a certain time". That's a lie, no one has ever called back.

My ex job at a courthouse, handwriting documents by pencil was about as performant as using C vs python compared to the computing system. There needs to be a large computing swipe to turn the tool back into a tool and not a straightjacket. Companies incentives are just not there.

> go bankrupt /../ the wrong doctor at the right hospital

This is the real problem. If we could solve that, none of the rest would be an issue.

Email from the dutch government: You have a message from <organization>. Log in to My Government to view.

Me: logging in to My Government using DigiD, which takes some effort, like five steps between two different sites and an app, but at least seems to be secure.

My Government message: you have a message from <organization>. Log in to <organization> portal to view message.

Me: Logging in to <organization> portal, again using DigiD (same steps).

<organization> portal message: There is a new document for you to download at My Documents in our portal.

Me: Wow, I don't even have to log in again, that's great! Document is not in the list, though. O, you have to select unread documents, otherwise you only get the old ones. Sure, makes sense.

Document: You student loan interest has been changed. We will send you your new monthly repayment amount soon.

Me: Great, glad I spent an hour finding out what was in that document...

This also enables Amazon to claim you purchased a different item than you did, or charge a different price. The only way to obtain documentation of a purchase is to take a screenshot of every transaction.

I bought some lightbulbs from Amazon recently. I am quite sure I purchased some 7-8 watt LED candle bulbs. I received a package of 50 watt incandescents, which was definitely not what I wanted. I went to my Amazon account and it showed I had purchased the incandescents. I looked at my email receipt, and all contained was is a list of links to Amazon, which led to their site, showing I had purchased the incandescents. The lack of text in the email meant I had no way to determine what I actually purchased and whether the mistake was on my end, Amazon's or the third party vendor.

Another explanation I’m predisposed to, due to personal involvement: I was on the Shop[1] team when it was transitioning from Arrive to Shop, and shifting from a package tracking application to a shopping cart. If you gave the app access to read your emails, we’d scan for tracking #s but also parse through emails from Amazon to pull data about what you ordered straight into the app, so you could track everything from one place. Shortly after Shop started gaining major traction in late 2019/early 2020, Amazon started pulling more and more details from their order confirmation emails, and we were less and less able to provide actionable info on your Amazon orders until they finally put the entire order behind a login, and all we could tell you in the Shop app was you had placed an order at Amazon.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/shop-package-order-tracker/id1...

I find it pretty annoying that the product info isn’t in the receipts, shipment notification, or delivery notification. A less charitable interpretation of Amazon’s motivation is that it forces you to click back to Amazon where they are trying to sell more to you.

> with Gmail, where you were so aggressive about mining receipt data from Amazon that when I get a receipt from Amazon now it doesn’t actually include what I bought

Anyone have a factual source that confirms that gmail is mining receipt data for advertising?

One refutation https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-gmail-purchases-priv... said in 2019 that Google’s Purchase’s page said “Google won't sell the [Purchases] information or use it to choose which ads you see”; however I did just log into Google and looked at https://myaccount.google.com/purchases and couldn’t find that text now, so who knows if that is still true.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20067714 refers to a second refutation from 2017 - “Google Will No Longer Scan Gmail for Ad Targeting”.

Edit: I did read an article talking about other companies scanning receipts to target advertising, so that could be a motivation of Amazon’s.

Another plausible explanation is that omitting the items you bought means that you have to log back into Amazon and look at your purchase history to see what you ordered. That gives amazon several more touch points to get you to buy more things, including the "buy it again" button that they put on the page for particular items. It also makes it more difficult for you to search for the name of something you bought in the past to order it from a different retailer.

Cannot reproduce - my emails from Amazon have the subject "Your order of X" and contain a link to X.

Another possibility is that email is sometimes unencrypted, email clients vary in how secure they are, and some regulation says they have to care about this because privacy.

But who knows, making stuff up like you and I did isn't evidence. At best it gives you an idea of the range of possibilities.

I don't think Gmail is the company that drove Amazon to this practice.

Source: I have a data provider that scrapes your email when you use their 3rd party email app, and sells your purchase receipts downstream. Google has no reason to do this to you, but the industry as a whole is shady.

Nah, Amazon just figured out they could get you to buy more by getting you to click back into the website.

Gmail hasn't mined data for commercial purposes for half a decade now. Someone at Amazon took dark-pattern customer engagement 101.

If I recall correctly, there's less a concern about Google than there are of malicious third-party data harvesters that gain full access to users inboxes by offering their service under the guise of being an email client. Edison Mail, Slice, and Rakuten are among the many offenders.

Maybe this is a U.S. thing or I don’t understand what you mean by ‘receipt’ but in the U.K. I get an ‘order confirmation’ which contains the things I ordered as well as various delivery updates.

I don't see this.

I ordered something from Amazon today and a full description of the item I bought, including size and price, is in purchase confirmation email...

Well, I suppose the devil's advocate argument is once you get to this stage (publicly traded company), the company's priority is no longer just "do things to get traction", but also "do things to support share price". You could argue the ex consultant MBA type product manager is better suited to solve a problem that institutional investors run by ex finance MBA types have.

IIRC 1Password doesn’t let you use Dropbox as a syncing/backing store anymore, and if it still does, it’s being deprecated.

I miss Simple. I liked it ever since finding it in a sponsored content slot on the new Digg. I cobbled together something like the Goals feature with spreadsheets, but it's not the same.

As for BBVA->PNC, I had to get the CFPB involved just to get confirmation that my account was closed.

https://old.reddit.com/r/BBVABank/comments/pypk87/good_news_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/BBVABank/comments/r53cjt/it_was_ano...

The "courtesy" waiver of the fee for the opt-out paper statement not one Simple abductee asked for ends in April, so we'll see how that goes.

Time for small claims court!

While I appreciate this argument, I feel it's disingenuous.

The reason is that this problem doesn't just apply to banks, it applies to every goddamn service I try to make contact with these days.

The systems are setup to waste a users time so only by showing a large commitment of time and emotional frustration can you get to talk to a human.

The net result is massive waste of everyone's time. It's a race to the bottom situation, and it's a societal problem, companies do it to compete.

But if your competition didn't do this hostile user gaslighting, then you wouldn't either. Or if instead of wasting 30 minutes average time before talking to someone with agency, the time was reduced to 5, or even 10 minutes.

I think the answer is regulation, that the mean or median average for time to speak to a live human should be no more than x (I propose 10 minutes), combined with an ombusdman to report companies that hide behind automated systems instead of do support, and if the average response time goes over allowed limit, or more than y percent of users report a company for not having a way to address their actual problem, then that company should pay a financial penalty, to it's users pro-rata. If the penalty is balanced, this way companies would actually share the cost of the people's time they are wasting.

> Here's the thing: retail banking margin is actually quite low and customer support is expensive.

Is this because banks don't need retail money any more, since instead of acting as intermediaries between savers and borrowers, they now act as intermediaries between the Federal Reserve and borrowers, and only take savings because they're required to by law?

> Here's the thing: retail banking margin is actually quite low and customer support is expensive. If you are someone who routinely calls your bank then your long-term value (LTV) is going to take a huge hit, so, of course banks want to keep everything as "low-touch" as possible.

Here’s the thing: this statement un-ironically embodies everything wrong behind the article.

1. “If you” — where you are the provider of capital the bank makes money from, or interest payments the bank makes money from, or fees the bank makes money from, i.e., the source of the bank’s revenue

2. “are someone” — victim blaming

3. “who routinely calls” — aka, who experiences so much friction in trying to accomplish routine banking tasks, they are willing to endure the abuse of the bank’s “customer support”; aka, who is willing to be the canary in the coal mine about abjectly terrible process; aka, the gift of customer feedback with willingness to get to the bottom of the issue, such as, why does this issue exist, and/or, why does this issue cause a call, and what can be done to ensure the next time the customer either (a) doesn’t experience it, or (b) can resolve it themselves in an obvious way less painful than calling in.

3. “then your LTV is going to take a huge hit” — no, your (the customer’s) LTV didn’t change, the bank is unable to service you effectively. Your value for revenue generation is the same. The bank’s inability to service you lowers their RoE, or return on equity.

And …

> thrawaybanksup (18 hrs ago) - Disclaimer: I work in a bank and have worked closely with the customer support team.

4. Not throwaway bank CTO, not disclaiming but disclosing: I spent ~5 yrs as CTO for Americas at the 2nd largest bank in the free world, trying to help it grasp what I’m sharing here. Worked closely with not just the customer support team, but all teams. From what I observed, I’d suggest your post exemplifies almost the entire banking industry’s fundamental misunderstanding of how to enable customer success in ways that drive bank success.

So here’s the actual thing:

In general, “support” is called for in the face of in-ability, and it’s the bank that is failing to provide that ability, even in the case of a senior checking their balance.

(ASIDE: You say “works closely with” the support team. Could be you’re with tech, could be product, could be a number of groups — regardless, the framing is that of customer service as cost center. So this post is addressing the customer service team or role. Moving on…)

Reframe everything you wrote imagining, for a moment, that customer success was a legitimate goal, and you may be able to hear how tone deaf support-as-cost-center is:

5. “Customer support is embarrassingly outsourceable” — Rephrase as “customer success is embarrassingly outsourceable” … Suddenly that doesn’t sound right, does it?

That sounds like someone somewhere isn’t doing a job.

For instance, since winning product management involves customer journey, customer experience, and reducing friction, why is “customer support” considered a cost center ripe for cost avoidance, and not signal priority one for product development?

L1, L2, L3, L4 — no product team in there anywhere, as if the errors are a technology team issue rather than a product usability fail!

Ouch.

Banking is still run by a vast “frozen middle” of management whose jobs depend on a flat refusal to accept any of the above.

In the rare example such as the bank called “Simple” which initially got it better, the few who figured that out will get gobbled up by a bigger bank that doesn’t get it seeking growth or returns or technology, folded into the larger bank’s operations, thereby destroying the difference never recognized — actually rejected — by a majority of the acquirer’s middle or even senior management team.

Sorry, @thrawaybanksup, you cannot outsource customer success. It’s a way of thinking, not middle or back office, or operations, or support. The bank in the customer’s experience, in the customer’s head, is the reality. It’s the bank that succeeds or fails.

Fight to elevate the support team’s role to help “solve the problem at the left”, a tight feedback loop prioritizing work where the product decisions are made, so terrible customer experience doesn’t get shoveled out back to bury a disempowered call agent, it lands on those responsible for the experience.

Help “Management” grasp the surprisingly effective concept that “support” redefined as “success” both improves margins and reduces support expense when driving simplifying the experience.

2. (again) “If you are someone who routinely calls your bank…” — No. Just no. Instead: If you are a bank which gets routinely called! …

This is all on the bank.

That's not true, they maintain them as a backup in case you corner a customer service representative on the phone and they are about to have to do what you asked. That's when they tell you you need to visit a branch.

Dutch banks:

Q: Well, at least I can still withdraw and deposit money there, right?

A: Actually, if you want to deposit coinage, we've outsourced that to home improvement stores instead.

> Missing: Q: "So can I just walk into one of those zillion bank branches you've set up in the last 10 years, squatting on all that storefront real estate that could be used for real businesses that sell me something, attract tourists, or whatever?"

> A: "No, they're just for show. We don't actually do any business there...

This is what I don't get about BECU being the most popular credit union in Puget Sound. Every time there's a thread on Reddit asking about the credit unions people use or if there's a newcomer who's at a social gathering or just on Twitter, BECU is always the recommended place. I don't understand, since their branches are solely there to sell you a mortgage.

Yet everyone is mad that Chase is opening branches all over town where you can do actual banking with an actual human.

(I'm neither a Chase nor BECU customer, for what it's worth.)

It gives them incentive to help customers, I suppose. I generally get good service and give appropriately good ratings.

On the occasions where I get assigned a clown, I have no problem giving the appropriate rating there either.

If I do those I just give glaring reviews so as to possibly relieve some small bit of human suffering.

This is still true of small credit unions, but over the last 30 years has become less true of giant credit unions in my experience. Large credit unions have have morphed into institutions that are nearly indistinguishable from banks, are run by the same executives (who move laterally back and forth between them), with the same culture, norms, and attitude towards customers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmembers.

And, unfortunately, small credit unions are finding it harder and harder to compete given the necessary investments to keep current technologically and meet new regulations.

what kinds of services do you get from a bank/CU that cost money? I've been using schwab for a few years, and the only thing I've ever had to pay them for was the privilege of throwing away my money on a couple stock options. I've only ever had to contact their support for help with problems caused by a different financial institution, and I was speaking with a human within one or two minutes.

I want this to be true, but when looking at both home and auto loans, the CUs around me were not remotely competitive on rates.

Spoilers: My bank is a local credit union.

Every time I hear this I try a different credit union around me. Sometimes they have arcane rules like "oh you don't actually have dollars in this account. You have 500 shares. At this time you may sell shares back to the credit union at a rate of $1/share". Or recently a credit union in my area emailed me my password after I signed up, and then they kept sending me it in the mail as a reminder that I hadn't activated my account yet. There's a credit union at my local health foods store run by a professor who self-hosts their website out of there and customer service is just his office hours, so I think that'll be fun to try next.

This seems very US centric?