For more than 15 years, I’ve worked for companies that provide outsourced contact center services to health insurance plans. It is no secret that the healthcare sector is behind other sectors, especially in providing digital customer experience. Amazon has set a high bar, so every consumer expects an Amazon-like experience. Even though I am fresh from an inexcusably bad customer experience from a health insurance plan (see my post on Master Class in DSAT), I believe I’ve stumbled across one sub-sector that is worse.

In my most recent posts, I’ve shared that I had a heart valve replaced (open heart surgery) eight weeks ago. One of the recommendations the surgeon’s team made was ‘subscribe to a meal delivery service’ to reduce the manual labor going into mealtimes. It is amazing how many such services there are. Nearly every Facebook ad I am served up is a meal delivery service. They all have the same stock requests involving weight loss goals, managing conditions such as diabetes or gluten intolerance, or just making meal prep easier. Surprisingly, none of them have any heart-healthy choices. Somehow this corner of the population is not addressed at all. The marketer in me sees this as an opportunity, but these companies don’t even consider heart healthiness an option. All of them are tone deaf in their incessant email communication about weight loss goals. When you have open heart surgery, you lose about 15% of your body weight, so your weight is a different concern.

Although I will not identify any companies by name, I sampled from two meal delivery services. The first one (company A) delivered the meals for the week in a special package, which they asked me to leave on my doorstep after unpacking the meals. Nowhere in their communication did they say they only pick up their package on alternate Thursday afternoons. My HOA noticed and threatened punishment if I didn’t remove the package from my doorstep. Okay, so maybe execution is not company A’s forte. How was the food? It was somewhere between vintage TV Dinners and military surplus MRE. And not cheap. Company B did somewhat better on execution but did not allow any substitutions. None of their meals were anything I would have chosen, not to mention what I would have considered heart-healthy. It is all cheese-intensive slop. Although I immediately canceled all subsequent orders, they claimed my cancellation was late and sent me an identical order. Same slop, different day. Fortunately, I was able to give the food away but still had to pay for it.

Two miserable customer experiences. They didn’t have to be. What could they have done better?

• Be clearer about your policies, especially regarding product returns.
• Make it easy for people to buy from you. These meal delivery services all make you sign up with a credit card before choosing the first meal. This is backwards, not to mention a potentially sinister practice that ensures a horrible customer experience.
• Own up to deficiencies in your product line. If you don’t have heart-healthy products, admit it. Don’t be so quick to book the order if you clearly cannot provide for the customer.
• Ease up on the volume of emails. You’re on track to receive what I call The Groupon Award for Unreasonable Email Excess. Groupon was the king back in their day. I would receive 15 to 20 different emails per day from the online consumer marketplace. Same thing with food delivery services. I consider 15 emails a day from anyone to be excessive.
• Answer questions from potential customers. All of these services have a “chat” or “contact us” feature on their websites. I’ve written to about 30 such companies to ask if they have heart-healthy meals. Guess how many responded. Yep, zero responses in the past 5 weeks. Batting .000. Not even the Mendoza Line is a reachable goal. Are you too busy to learn from potential customers? Did you not train the chatbot to understand the request?
• Unsubscribe means just that. Take me off your list. Now.

Not that it is any consolation, but I believe I have found an industry that outdoes healthcare in providing a poor digital CX. And these are all newish companies, so there is no excuse for such poor operation.