How not to do business

I'm probably not one to talk, as in my own business I can get a bit forgetful and lazy when it comes to the paperwork and the marketing stuff. You know, the part I don't like. But that aside, as a consumer I have critiques of others.

For the past couple of weeks I've been catching up on more-or-less routine stuff one has to do healthcare-wise. I brought Zephyr in for his booster shot and check-up with Dr. S. I went to the dentist for the routine cleaning. Had my doctor renew my prescriptions. And I have been looking for somewhere to get an eye exam/glasses Rx update. I definitely need new lenses, particularly for the right eye, plus that damned floater that popped up last summer still hasn't gone away and it's super irritating and I want an actual optometrist to tell me what my options are even if all s/he says is the same as what I learned from WebMD.

I wanted someplace within walking distance, and there's a super-convenient place just a couple blocks from here, but it turns out they charge about $100 more for an exam than other places and I'm as thrifty as ever given the complete chaos being wrought on our economy (thankfully, I dumped all the mutual funds/stocks/etc. in my IRA last month and just have everything in a money market now while the Dow dives off a cliff; I'll have to give that whole thing some thought later on). So I opted to try a place that operates out of the complex with the local Costco that's walkable if I have 30-40 minutes.

They have a not-bad website, and it has a form for scheduling appointments. So I submitted it. Instead of a confirmation or rejection of my chosen time or anything like that, all it did was generate a phone call the next morning at 8:00am. Do you think I answered the unknown number at 8:00am? Of course not. The message they left was not to confirm my appointment but to ask if I wanted to schedule one and if so to call them back.

What do you think the form was for?

I called back the next day. No answer, left a message. Then I forgot about it for a few days.

I tried again, submitted the appointment form. Again, all it did was generate a phone call the next morning. Worthless.

I just called them again a short while ago, and just as I was about to hang up after the 7th ring someone answered; hearing my request for an exam, she said the next available appointment is in April.

I stopped short of just saying "you guys suck" and hanging up, I was more polite than that, but I did say no thanks and will go somewhere else. I instead bit the bullet and made an appointment for tomorrow back in my old neighborhood that I'll have to drive to, but it's tomorrow and the scheduling was easy and only took one attempt and it won't cost me $200.

The takeaway here is that if you have a business that involves scheduling appointments, you should only make that a feature of your website if you're actually going to let people use it. If you want to only do such things by phone then just say that on the site and don't bother with the psych-out form. And maybe either return your own phone messages or have someone dedicated to reception/telephone appointments.

This was a tiny, minor inconvenience really, and one I rectified by going to a different provider. Imagine that magnified by a factor of 100,000 and you might approach what many American seniors will be experiencing with the Social Security Administration now that Elon has started taking his blowtorch to it.