Some of you followed my live blog of this as it happened the other day via my Twitter feed. For those of you that didn't, here's a fun game to play the next time you have to call a Medco mail-order facility for a prescription transfer:
The process will be excruciating, as you are probably well aware. It will start more times than not with a customer giving you a scrap of paper with an 800 number on it that will get you nowhere near a pharmacist. You will wade through voicemail hell to get to a human, who will begin the process of transferring you to a person who can actually help you. The ordeal will be like my penis, long and hard, but so worth the effort to get to. Because, when you finally reach that pharmacist practicing the profession from a cubicle 2,000 miles away, and you beat the information you need out of them, they will ask you a question:
"Can you repeat that back to me?"
It is their policy that you repeat the information they just gave you back to them. Their policy I said, not the law. Which means at this point you should hang up on them. Then the fun will begin. Because they will try like hell to get that repeated information. They will call you back almost immediately, and now my friends, all the power in this transaction shifts into your hands.
I've figured out they'll hold for about 10 minutes of silence before they give up. So what I'll do is around minute 7 or 8, pick up the phone and apologize for being so busy, but tell them if they can just hold on a little longer, I'll get to them as soon as I can.
Then I assure them their call is very important to me.
A couple of other tricks you may want to use: If you have a bilingual staff, you can help out the Medco cubicle rat by offering to help them in multiple languages. They'll appreciate your commitment to customer service as you let them know they can request Spanish by pressing numero seiete. In my case, I can also offer them Hindi. I bet they'll give me an extra dispensing fee for that.
Or, you may want to remind the cubicle rat that Medco's CEO seems to think that talking to retail pharmacists is vastly overrated, and that robots may be the way to go. Then maybe suggest that the cubicle rat go try to call a robot and hang up again.
The possibilities are endless really, and it makes your workday....I dare say...slightly pleasant. I now treasure an opportunity to transfer a prescription from Medco almost more than anything else I do.
Until the robot comes that is.
12 comments:
My darling, My Drug Monkey,
I'm writing this to remind you that I worked as a Medco cubicle placeholder for almost 30 days last year and before that I've done a number of other hellish "customer service" jobs.
You're being awfully hard on that person. After all, what they really want to be doing is out protesting with Occupy Wall Street. But they have neither the time nor the money to do so.
See once upon a time that person graduated from high school with a dream. Of going to college or even the rare but still existent vocational program. Getting a job, raising a family, heck, maybe even buying a house someday.
And maybe they got halfway there before the rug was pulled out from under them when the economy tanked and the job they were working didn't exist anymore and the house they scraped so hard to save a downpayment for got foreclosed on because after six months of only being able to find part time work, they couldn't even find a buyer to short sell to because everyone else is in the same boat as they are.
And desperate for more than a part time job, they answer an ad promising customer service work for $10 buck an hour - cheap but at least it's full time. And they find themselves at a temporary agency where they're promised that $10 bucks an hour and health insurance even, as long as they pass a drug screen.
And after losing a job and a house and the humiliation of using food stamps, peeing in a cup to secure employment just doesn't seem so bad anymore. It's just one more downgrade in your pride, but you suck it up because there are people depending on you.
And so you finally get past the ridiculous training classes that never give you enough information to do that job - you'll learn that as you go - but you will leave the training class with just enough information to barely navigate their computer system and you have learned that your calls are being recorded and you must say so and so - you must ask so and so - and you must have the pharmacist repeat the information back to you...
And if you don't ask...because hey, the pharmacist never wants to repeat this stuff back and the last guy kept you on hold for 10 minutes and never asked your question...well maybe you haven't asked one time to many and now your phone calls aren't in "compliance" and hey, they have plenty more poor slobs who can actually attempt to get this right.
You're out on your ass again. Not for anything you really did wrong. You clock in and out on time, even for your breaks and you never do anything against company rules. But it was one time too many that you skipped over asking the pharmacy to "please repeat that" because you knew he wasn't going to answer anyway and now you're out of a job.
So you will always ask. Because these calls are being recorded for training purposes. They are being recorded so the rep can be assured that yes, they will be fired for continued minor slips like this.
So treasure these moments drug monkey. Treasure making the life of some $10 and hour slob like me just the slightest bit more uncomfortable in the name of feeding themselves and maybe a family or sending an extra few bucks to their kid who is in college on scholarships, student loans and a prayer.
Treasure those moments of making that person's life harder for your amusement.
Because I guess life isn't really worth living if we can't take the crappiness that is our own job and life and spread it around.
Deborah my dear,
Well written and eloquent as always, and maybe correct in another situation, but not this one.
Read what I wrote again. I am playing the "read it back to me" trick to another pharmacist. Someone equal in rank to myself who has sold out his profession to the mail order demons. By the time I get to this person, making 6 figures and possessing many, many options for their professional career, I have waded through two or three $10 customer service types.
No innocent working class people are harmed in this maneuver.
Possibly. More like, you're talking to someone who's sitting next to a pharmacist- as in 3-4 cubicle rows away from a pharmacist who's "supervising".
Didn't you write about that recently? It's sad, but very true.
I had my suspicions... and they seemed spot-on that the assembly-line of people that the pharmacist is transferred to at the 1-800- number during week bankers' hours are NOT anyone involved in the medical profession.
When I call PBM Drug Warehouse for medical prescription information about my hospital patient that was just transferred to the floor from the ER from a MVA off the interstate a few hours ago 500 miles from their hometown, the people that talk to me try to baffle me with BS and things like 'you can't talk to us unless we know your NPI number, you could be anyone wanting to know something confidential' and I think, 'yea, you're not a pharmacist, so I don't think you have any legal options to tell me anything; get me to someone that does, a damn pharmacist, you friggin' obstructionist'
This cubico in the story is NOT a $10/hr workerbee, no way. This is the big kahuna that ALL the other $7.50/hr, $12.00/hr, and $11.25/hr workers have established the transparent red carpet for, the one that cannot be bothered to talk, to confirm an allergy, date of birth, address, prescriber or look up a drug history, to answer anything about THEIR patient, because they have no allegiance to the profession as comrades in healthcare. They only answer to their PBM manager, as far as I can tell.
There oughta be a law aginst places that sell drugs without compunction. They don't comply with laws of decency in my State, so why do I have to deal wid 'em?
Haha! Wow. If that pic of Medco's David Snow isn't that of an overpaid douchebag with an MBA, then I don't know what is. Even Wasson couldn't pull that off!
He looks like a second-rate magician straight outta Branson. Priceless!
this made me laugh!
The first thing to do when the 'robot computer' answers the phone is to talk jibberish...something no human nor computer can understand. Then, you will hear "wait, let me get someone on the phone to help us" and you get transferred to a live, real person.
Wait, so you are telling me Medco let a $10/hr clerk transfer a prescription under the supervision of a pharmacist? You mean an actual pharmacist wasn't the one transferring the prescription? Did you just tell me some illegal act that Medco committed?!
MAN, I am SO bummed that they never ask us doctor-types to repeat shit back to them. They just ask us if there is anything else they can help me with. Like I save up stacks of this shit to do in my spare time.
Meanwhile, I just say "And what did you have in mind?" in a very insinuating voice.
With the new year upon us, I have been asked by a number of potential new customers what becomes of their Medco prescription now that their CalPERS has switched to Caremark. Initially, I just faxed for new prescriptions from their MD, but eventually one person convinced me to call Medco. After 45 minutes of hold time, I spoke to a cubical dweller who told me the files were all transferred to Caremark. After a few minutes more holding at Caremark, I was told the transfer I was looking for didn't exist. The agent there told me he had call after call with the same result of prescriptions lost. Did Medco intentionally lose files of scripts in cyberspace? May be worth some investigation.
Wow! You're killing me right now. I've had numerous patients walk in telling me "Medco said that you have all my information in your computer" and ofcourse, I have nothing. All their patients are under the impression that their prescriptions were automatically and electronically transferred to CVS retail stores. Yet, we have nothing and we have to go through the whole process of getting a transfer, just like we would when calling another chain. Most of the time, patients are upset and think that I'm feeding them a bunch of BS when I tell them I dont have their meds nor do I have any information about their meds.
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