Conflict, decision making, and organizational design

At Anthem, conflict negotiation is pretty much taught as the rule not the exception. We’re trained to deal with conflict and negotiation strategies to help ourselves get out of the conflict. It’s part of the job and expected that customers are not always going to be happy with Anthem and as such are going to want something in return for their frustrations. We often get customers calling in, most of the time due to their own fault with frustrations over not understanding their coverage, going to non participation providers, or health services not covered. This is when the ball is in our court and we pretty much get to decide if we want to help the customer, but some are more persistent than others in the fact that they want to get more than they technically deserve. There are also customers who have had problems due to someone in our organization not doing something right and they deserve a speedy resolution. Negotiation strategies differ on both of these. If it was due to their negligence, we are taught to offer sympathy and education as far as what the customer can do to avoid issues. If a customer is persistent about wanting something back we’ll take it on a case by case basis and check out their payment history and see if they’ve had credits before. If so we’re less likely to offer anything, but we’ll normally start with a promotion instead of credit to see if the customer would like something off in the future, often times it would be more money than we are crediting in the interim. But if push comes to shove we’ll more often than not credit a portion rather than losing a customer. If it’s a high bill due to something that we did we’ll definitely own it and no negotiation is really needed, we’ll credit back what the customer deserves. According to “Negotiation Strategies” one of the common