IVR hell: 'Oh, great, now you tell me'

摘要

So I'm on the phone to my health insurance provider, Cigna HealthCare, and I'm dealing with one of those fancy-pants IVR systems that utilize voice-recognition technology so that you don't have to keep punching buttons. When these things work well they're a modern-day marvel, even though the voices are always a little bit creepy.That morning? ... Not so marvelous. The reason for my call was that the insurance provider had recently issued my family new cards but neglected to send one for our son Max. This is a fairly common occurrence in our household because databases seem to have trouble accepting that three children in one family can have the exact same birth date, thus one of our 5-year-old triplets will often be treated as a data-input error instead of an actual human being in need of a health insurance card.