Yowza! This is a great example of how being highly efficient can provide BAD service.

• I needed to research more inexpensive health insurance for my seven year old daughter. I hit Google and found a site that seemed reputable for offering quotes.
• I completed just the contact portion of the first form, clicked “Save and Proceed”
• I was in the middle of completing the second one when my mobile phone rang with a very nice woman from Austin who introduced herself and was confirming my on-line submission. Somewhat stunned at the rapid response I joked “Wow, you folks are fast, but yes, that’s all accurate, what I’m looking for is….”

Before I could finish my sentence my (very loud) home office phone rang with a Florida phone number. I have relatives there, so I asked the woman on my mobile phone to sit tight for a moment so I could quickly get this call and tell them I’d call back. Except it wasn’t a relative, but a SECOND insurance representative calling me from a different outfit?

I explained she was 48 seconds too late, that I already had someone on the line. She said “Can I call you back?” I said yeah that was fine but I’d like to get back to her since she’s waiting on my other phone. That was met with a somewhat terse “When can I call you back?” “Can I call you back in 30 minutes?” (At this point my blood pressure is rising; I have a phone in each hand, and just want to get on with it.)

I hung up the second call and within three seconds (!!) the phone rang again with a THIRD rep calling me. I hung up the phone and a FOURTH rep called me. Frustrated, I just turned off the ringer and chatted with the nice lady from Austin. Since then my phone has rang an additional three times for a total of seven calls within roughly 15 minutes.

Lesson learned – Being efficient at getting back to someone is all well and good, but angering a potential customer while you pummel them with phone calls utterly destroys any goodwill you earned being too fast and aggressive. This was good process causing a bad result because the lead generation site doesn’t see me as their customer. The carriers they give the leads to are the customer. I’m just a means to an end. Unfortunately the carriers now bear the burden of my dissatisfaction with the arrangement before they even had a chance to earn my business.

The web site that got me to fill in the form now has me hacked off at them, and the only way I’ll view any of this as positive is if the nice woman that called me first gets a result we’re happy with.