When Customer Support Knows More Than Your Product Documentation
My mother’s experience with an insurance form is where this investigation started
My 82-year-old mother recently received a letter from her medical insurance company asking her to complete a form online. It was straightforward until she reached a required field* labeled Member Number. The on-screen text explained that she could find that number on her insurance card, but her card didn’t include a field labeled Member Number. Instead, it listed a Policy ID, a Group Number, and several pharmacy-related identifiers.
Rather than guess, she called customer support. The representative who served her told her to enter the Policy ID.
My mother replied:
“If they’re the same thing—and to be clear, they’re not—I wouldn’t have needed to call you in the first place.”
The representative knew immediately why my mother was frustrated and which number she actually needed. My mother didn’t.
Why Insurance Forms And Cards Use Different Terms
Typically, these mismatches arise because the form, insurance card, and customer support content are each built and maintained (well, sometimes 😎) by different teams (often using different software) with no shared single source-of-truth connecting their terminology.
Each team labels the same identifier within its own system and for its own purposes, which can be — and often are — different. Nobody owns the relationship between the differing labels.
Is This Just An Insurance Industry Problem?
No, it isn’t. I’ve seen the same disconnect in software licensing terms, telecom account numbers, HR benefits portals — anywhere a form asks for one thing and the source document hands the customer another.
My mother’s insurer isn’t unusual in this respect. In my own consulting work, I’ve repeatedly encountered the same pattern: organizational structures that divide work into departments tend to produce siloing, and the mismatched results of that situation often produce exactly this kind of labeling problem. When the results get big enough (inconvenient, painful, expensive enough), I call them content hairballs, a term I picked up from Ray Gallon, co-founder of The Transformation Society, who once described organizational content as a tangled mass that different teams and disciplines each get their hands into without anyone owning the whole.
Is This One Insurer’s Mistake Or An Industry-Wide Pattern?
I didn’t need to investigate whether this was unique to my mother’s insurer. Experience had taught me it wasn’t. What I wanted to know was whether people were talking about it publicly, and they are.
As one explainer puts it, insurers aren’t consistent in how they label these numbers, and it routinely tells people to call customer support if they’re not sure which number applies. That guidance exists because people keep asking the same question online — strangers, in public, running into the same confusion my mother did.
That phone call to support isn’t an exception. It’s the documented, expected way the ambiguity gets resolved in far too many organizations today.
What This Reveals About Product Info As A Business Asset
The relationship between Member Number and Policy ID has already been resolved once — by a customer support representative who knew the answer. That resolution doesn’t live anywhere a customer (or an AI system) could find it on their own.
My mother’s support call didn’t happen because information was missing. It happened because the relationship between the two terms was never made explicit where she needed it. Customer support teams have been consistently bridging gaps like that for years, absorbing the cost of inconsistent terminology one phone call at a time. ☎️
AI systems reason from whatever product information organizations make available to them. When the relationship between two terms is implicit there, AI inherits the same ambiguity customers have been living with for years. An AI assistant can’t ask a colleague which label the organization really intended — it can only reason from the evidence it’s given, and it doesn’t always do that correctly.
What This Means For AI Readiness
AI readiness may start earlier than most organizations assume; with terminology management, before any model, prompt, or retrieval system gets involved. If AI systems depend on someone having resolved relationships like Member Number and Policy ID, what else has customer support been compensating for that no one ever wrote down? 🤠