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Comment by gkop | Hacker News Reader

Zenefits: you are growing too fast! Scale up your customer service and improve your customer satisfaction rates before making big customer acquisition pushes, else you risk disappointing your existing customers. (Anecdote: I am a disappointed existing customer)

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Our view of this is that growth is not inconsistent with improving the service - and, actually, quite the opposite, our growth is what gives us the ability to solve a lot of the challenges in this industry.

This is particularly relevant in your case (an installation error on Aetna's end). One of the biggest problems with health insurance for companies < 1,000 employees is that everything is done via paper / pdf / fax machine. This is of course a pain in the ass, but more importantly it's a source of large and irreducible error. Insurance companies average about 10% to 20% error rates on the stuff that we send them even if Zenefits is 100% correct. These errors aren't unique to Zenefits -- any broker or other company doing this stuff would have them -- and we spend a lot of time following up with carriers to verify, etc....

Here's the important thing -- our growth means we can make insurance companies build APIs for us, some of which are live right now, and many more of which will be live in the coming months. Only with this full electronic integration can these processing errors go away, for us and for everyone else. APIs == zero errors. Existing paper / pdf method can never fully eliminate errors b/c we (zenefits) don't control the guy on Aetna's end who is keying information into their system.

This is a really bad answer to a concern about customer service, just a heads up. We want to be reassured that you value your customers and will be working to make things better no matter what, not given paragraphs on why it's actually someone else's fault.

Agreed, and it's a running theme in most customer service interactions with Zenefits (Aetna's fault, Intuit's fault, etc.). There's also tends to be long delays in response times because of the back and forth between Zenefits and the provider, and sometimes conflicting responses which make things really frustrating.

Disagree. He's transparently articulating the causes of the error.

But when the entire "cause" is someone else's fault it rings hollow.

I don't think so, basically the HN crew wants to see the nuts and bolts, and he's giving a real reason why problems happen on the platform. I personally find it refreshing when someone from a B2B company helps me understand their internals, it helps me trust them more because either their sound or not.

Sure, it's interesting to know (even if there's no way to verify what he's saying is correct), but it starts to come off as passing the buck. I think your perspective on the HN crowd might have been more valid 3-4 years ago but let's not pretend like it's still the same group of people.

We use Zenefits and (AFAIK) have no issues with the service. Just throwing it out there that a little reassurance goes a long way.

Yeah I agree on both points. Nothing really substitutes knowing (and hearing) someone is in your corner.

The notion that "APIs == zero errors" is absolutely not sound.

As a side note, it's great that the CEO and cofounder of Zenefits still visits and replies on HN.

I hope that you're citing an API solution as a way to build your appeal with the HN crowd and not as a legitimate reply to a customer service problem. Until this API is available can you speak to the manual operations work that takes place on your end to identify and correct these commonplace errors?

edit: As someone who wants to give Zenefits a serious go but has some concerns.

Parker, I have emailed you twice now, in reference to an egregious failure of your team. First on January 29, 2015 and again, yesterday. I view receiving no response from you nor a member of your executive staff as evidence that you just don't understand how critical health benefits are to small businesses like mine (12 employees). We need a partner that values our relationship - why can't you compete on this vector with the local health insurance broker?

I'm also a disappointed customer because my first payroll cycle was two weeks late. This (or worse) happened for my colleagues as well. Apparently the integration between Zenefits and ZenPayroll is not ironed out.

> I am a disappointed existing customer

Are you at liberty (and are willing) to share any specific examples of the problems?

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