Posts tagged house insurance
"A Direct Line to your wallet"
Mar 17th
That was the headline in the Guardian on Saturday, where Direct Line were lambasted for charging some fellow a much higher rate for his insurance renewal than they were quoting if he had been a new customer.
On the face of it, it looks quite bad by Direct Line. They quoted him a price of £551 when a new customer would have been offered £173. There’s no getting away from the fact that Mr Robert King, 55, is paying too much for his home insurance.
But looking more closely at the story, I can’t help but feel that Mr King is at least partly responsible for his own misfortune here. He’s been with the company for 10 years and in all that time has never compared his home insurance renewal quotes until now. Says he, “I know the advice is to shop around for the best quote,” and so he should, being an accountant.
Funnily enough, on the way in this morning I saw a large billboard from Direct Line promising their renewal premiums for car insurance would not rise in year two. There is a rather vague disclaimer stating that ANY change to your details or your policy will invalidate the guarantee. So 3 speeding points, and a claim (both specifically mentioned) but remember that your guarantee is also worthless if you change cars, jobs, annual mileage, named drivers, postcode – anything really – and it doesn’t matter if the risk goes up or down. I wonder what the percentage of drivers is where no details at all change year on year.
At least they’ve got happy customers supporting them all the way and making supportive videos. Oh, no wait a minute…
Apparently, Mr Daz feels a bit aggrieved with the way Direct Line have treated him.
Insurance Claims Question – what do you think?
Feb 20th
Here’s one for those of you sitting insurance exams…
Is this situation covered on the truck insurance, home insurance, breakdown policy or the bridge owners’ public liability?
They’ll probably leave it there, where an estate agent will describe it as
“a charming bungalow in a unique location, river views, good road access”
Makes me glad that people don’t generally try delivering fully assembled houses on trucks in this country.
Norwich Union’s Indian Merry Go Round
Jan 31st
Poor old Norwich Union. It seems that once again their desire to shift as many jobs to Madras as possible has landed them with trouble.
Now it seems that they’ve been forced to move back a few jobs to Norwich, because their Indian household claims staff didn’t understand “cultural differences”. Particular mention has been made of the ‘graduate level’ staff not knowing what an immersion heater does. Presumably, given the rather drastic steps taken, there was no possibility of them being trained either. I suppose they don’t teach basic plumbing and heating on Eastenders.
James Evans, NU’s Media Relations Director, was in forthright mood:
“What we do as a company is see what works and see what we could do better. At the end of the day we don’t want to annoy customers, who we want it to be a good experience for. If something doesn’t work, there’s no point persevering with it.”
But they’re still offshoring another 1,000 jobs to India this year, despite the fact that their own research revealed 51% of their customers were ‘appalled’ by overseas call centres. Now that’s what I call listening to your customers!
If you want to be sure that your home insurance to be handled by someone who isn’t confused by the massive cultural differences between home heating systems, then you could do worse than give us a call on 0800 089 0203, where all of our staff are still based in Norfolk, and know all about household insurance matters. Some of them even watch Eastenders.