Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

– A doctor makes patients pay in full even if they have insurance, leaving the patient to file all the claim forms afterwards.

– A routine claim gets rejected for an illogical reason, but instead of resubmitting it with an appropriate note, the doctor just sends an invoice to the patient.

– An insurance company receives a claim with an old policy number on it, but instead of just using the new policy number associated with that patient, they reject the claim entirely.

I’m not trying to blame doctors here, since they’re usually as much a victim as the patients are. Nor am I claiming that the US healthcare system is anything but a total train wreck. But with all that said, individual people can make a big difference by just using common sense in the situations I described above. Nobody wins when invoices and claims and documents have to go back and forth a half dozen times for routine things. By taking an extra few minutes to address these simple problems when they first arise, the people pushing paper through the system can at least make things easier for the patients they are supposed to be serving.

If you live in Chicago, you probably know that the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) has been doing construction on the train lines north of downtown for what seems like years. Typically, this has meant fewer, more crowded trains, along with longer travel times. With this in mind, I was very pleased to see a prominent sign on a Brown Line train this weekend, proclaiming that construction was complete and thanking the riders for being patient.

Well, the sign spoke too soon. Our northbound trip went smoothly, but the southbound return leg was slow and crowded. As the conductor told us during one of the delays, the construction was still taking place. And because I just saw a sign that proclaimed construction was done, I was much more annoyed than usual.

Clearly, someone at the CTA messed up, and posted the signs too soon. Or, perhaps they were only referring to the northbound work being complete. Either way, the message was that service was back to normal, but the reality is that construction and delays are still taking place. And riders are probably getting even more annoyed by the delays, since they fly in the face of what the signs say.

At least we can learn a lesson here: don’t put up an important announcement until you’re sure the underlying work has been completed and customers can see and experience the changes. Otherwise, you’re inviting people to scrutinize a work-in-progress. Unless you have an unusually forgiving customer base, they’re going to be very unhappy when they learn that things are quite a bit different than what you promised.

The state income tax rate varies a lot across the US, from as little as 0% up to 10% or more. I live in Illinois, which has historically had one of the lowest personal income tax rates: 3%. However, the new governor insists they need to raise the income tax rate to 4.5% in order to make ends meet. Given how tough the economic situation is right now, I can’t imagine a worse move to make.

When you think about it, the personal income tax is a big part of the cost of living differences between different states. If you view each state as a product, the income tax is part of the price you pay for that product. So, raising taxes is like raising prices. All else equal, higher prices typically lead to lower sales. For Illinois, this means fewer people will move here, and more current residents will move away.

I haven’t heard a peep from the governor or even the news media about how higher taxes might reduce the number of actual taxpayers in Illinois. Surely, some people will seek refuge in lower-tax states. In turn, the added revenue that the state promised from higher income taxes will fall way short of projections — leaving the remaining residents paying more taxes just to maintain the old revenue levels. Even worse, the budget shortfall that led to the tax increase will still be there, meaning that the government drove people away, increased the burden on those who stayed, and didn’t make a dent in the original problem.

I’ve been having an occasional problem with my TiVo, so I decided to research the issue online. A web search quickly brought me to the official forums at tivo.com, where numerous other people have experienced the same issue. Basically, the TiVo will sometimes record a gray screen instead of the program, and it doesn’t even generate an error message to explain why. After looking through the forums, the consensus seems to be a problem with the tuner software. However, the only way anyone has fixed it was to exchange the TiVo for a new one.

Obviously, doing a hardware exchange is no fun. And I bet TiVo would prefer that customers try a software or firmware fix first. But the info on the forums points strongly to a hardware swap. Meanwhile, TiVo staff is strangely absent from the dozens of forum threads about the gray screen issue. Now, I don’t expect them to police every forum posting. That would be incredibly time-consuming and also defeats much of the purpose of having a user forum in the first place (namely, the ability for users to help one another without staff intervention). But the company should be doing more than they are today, at least when it comes to this specific issue.

As a product or service provider, hosting a forum on your site or sponsoring a third-party forum involves a significant amount of responsibility. Whether you like it or not, people will assume you have approved the content on the forum, and they will perceive the content as more authoritative. Returning to my TiVo example, this means that a lot of people with the gray screen issue will see other users saying to return the device. Since it’s on TiVo’s official forum, there’s a greater chance they will follow this advice, without investigating other solutions. For TiVo, this means more hardware returns, which are clearly more costly than a remote software update, for example.

What’s the best approach here? Simple: just have some of your staff members monitor the forums for widespread or otherwise serious issues, and respond with a clarification when needed. Then, nominate some of the most active forum users to serve as moderators, and give them direct access to your senior tech support staff so they can consult on how to answer the more difficult questions. Granted, this certainly isn’t groundbreaking advice, and it all seems pretty obvious. But I get the feeling that many companies are coming up short in their forum strategy, since they’re failing to allocate the staff resources to do it right.

While waiting on hold with some random call center, I noticed something strange: I’ve actually become more patient over the past few months. Normally, I would have been rather annoyed with a 15 minute delay, but this time I didn’t mind. “They must be really overwhelmed,” I thought to myself, figuring that the company had some layoffs and a smaller group of agents was handling all the same work.

As I thought about this more, I realized that I’ve been making the same assumption about other customer service interactions. My expectations are measurably lower because of what’s going on with the economy, and I’m more forgiving of slow responses. If other consumers are thinking along the same lines, how should businesses react?

While the temptation might be to cut back even further in light of reduced expectations, I think a more balanced approach will be more successful. In particular, if wait times are longer because you’ve had to cut back on staffing, then you should appeal to people’s sense of reason. Just make sure what you tell customers is honest and never condescending. And of course, don’t overdo it: you still need to provide high-quality service during a recession, but people will understand if things take a little bit longer than normal.

With all the recent fraud in the financial services and real estate sectors, it’s sometimes hard to believe the US has any reputable companies at all. Yet we have firms like Southwest, Trader Joe’s, and Amazon that seem to universally excel in treating customers and employees right, while still producing huge revenues. Why don’t we see companies like this in the world of investment banking, or health insurance, or defense contracting?

Clearly, there are massive barriers to entry in those areas, but the same might be said for things like air travel and retail. Maybe the industries just attract crooked individuals who are great at stealing money and ripping off employees and customers alike. Whatever the cause, it’s a shame that our country produces such great successes in some areas, yet seems to take back one hundred times that amount when we let other industries bankrupt the same consumers that all businesses rely upon to drive the economy.

I wonder if the way that an organization handles customer suggestions is a good predictor of its long-term success. Suggestions come in many forms: written on a comment card, sent via email, or just spoken verbally to an employee on the front lines. It can be a huge task to make sure that all of these get reviewed and passed along to people who have the motivation and authority to act on them. However, I suspect that investing the time to take customer suggestions seriously — and of course, actually implementing the best ones — will lead to increased revenues in the long run.

Although online pioneers like Amazon provide very detailed emails after you complete a transaction, some companies are going the opposite route. Rather than telling you what took place, they just send an email with a generic message, e.g. “We completed your transaction — please log in to the website to view the transaction details.” This might seem like the easy and secure way to handle things, but it’s also a hassle. By requiring another step beyond reading the email itself, these confirmation messages take up more of the customer’s valuable time.

As a compromise, email confirmations should include just enough detail to see what took place, without disclosing any private information. For example, a mutual fund confirmation might show the name of the fund and whether shares were bought or sold, but probably shouldn’t say the number of shares, price, or account number. With this small improvement, customers won’t have to log in to the site after every routine transaction. They’ll spot the relevant details in the email, and in most cases, that’s all they need to feel confident in what took place. And by saving them time with every interaction, you should end up with higher customer retention and increased word of mouth referrals.

Catching a taxi in the city is a fairly haphazard affair. You have to get the cab driver’s attention, make sure they take the payment method you want to use (e.g. credit card), and then verify that your trip isn’t too short or too long for where they’re willing to travel. To streamline this process, many airports and other high-traffic venues require all the taxis to wait in an orderly line, and also require that they accept credit cards and abide by other standard terms.

In theory, this makes things easier for passengers. But there’s a downside as well. You see, the orderly line means that you always have to take the first cab in the line. Even if you approach a cab that is second or third, they’ll tell you to get into the first taxi instead. First in, first out seems fair to the drivers, since nobody can hustle their way into more rides. However, it also takes choice away from the customer.

How does this relate to the environment? In my experience, newer taxis are either small, energy-efficient hybrids, or large and gas-hungry minivans. And if a minivan is the first one in the line, you’re forced to ride in there, even if you’re traveling alone or with just one other person. Since big parties would have to wait for a minivan taxi anyway, this situation means that every small party traveling in a minivan uses more gas than necessary.

To correct the imbalance, they should split the taxi lines into two sections: one for small parties and one for larger ones. Or, just let smaller parties choose the first smaller vehicle in the line — or opt for a hybrid. With this approach, consumers get more choice, less gas is wasted, and the original benefits of the taxi line are still preserved.

During my trip to Vancouver, I stayed at a surprisingly nice Best Western hotel. Shortly after arriving, I was pleased to see two bottles of water right next to the in-room coffeemaker. At first, I was worried that they would charge some exorbitant hotel price if I so much as looked at the bottles. But I didn’t see a rate card with prices on there, and my wife reminded me that the hotel promoted the complimentary bottled water on their website. Amazingly, it appeared that the water was actually free, which added up to some nice savings over a multi-day trip.

With so many hotels charging exorbitant prices for in-room snacks and drinks, customers have been trained to expect that everything has a cost associated with it. Accordingly, if you operate a hotel that actually provides things for free, you need to be very clear about it. This goes for your marketing materials (website, brochures, etc.) as well as the in-hotel and in-room messaging. In my case, marking the water bottles with “Free”, “Complimentary”, or “Provided at no charge” would help clarify things. Even better, tell people how much they’re saving based on local prices, e.g. “Free – $2 value”.

Besides reducing confusion for customers, this approach helps remind people that you’re saving them money. It’s also a subtle reminder that you’re different than those other hotels, which seem hell-bent on nickel-and-diming their patrons whenever they can.