Receiving H.E.L.P. When You Really Need It

After the last post, a friend wrote a short letter of encouragement to me and I replied with the following text (now abridged). Thanks for your inspiration!

You know, it is funny, but I never once thought that the insurance company was out to rip me off, but I continue to believe that it is just that the company has its own internal workings that are, accidentally or deliberately, opaque to the customer. There's an easy way to get what you need. You just have to discover it.

In our case, we had the expectation, (set by many years of watching the company's "We're here to [assist]" adverts), that we would be treated compassionately and with enough professional assistance to help us lodge, and successfully press, our claims against our policy. After all these guys do this stuff every day, they must see what happens to people like us, and understand our needs.

The reality, however, fell short of the rhetoric. Our assigned claims manager said that he had never processed a total-loss claim before, and while he behaved as though he were personally sympathetic and quite conciliatory on many matters, also seemed to be very overworked. His business card shows that he was one of a few responsible for claims in the entire SE corner of NSW, from the mid-west of the state, right down to the VIC-NSW border.

His inexperience led to him not giving us a new copy of our insurance policy to remind us of our rights and obligations for a very long time (we burned the original, after all). It took nearly 4 weeks before we even saw a claims kit (filled with handy information). It may not have done much good before that because I can tell you not a lot of information was staying in my head in the first two weeks, we were so shocked.

Suffice to say that eventually we did get our act together and used the information provided in our policy and claims kit to put together a cogent, conservative case. What was the real disappointment was that we had to be totally focussed and determined to receive the benefits of our claim. We mapped out a course of action to press our claim, and decided in advance the thresholds for escalation to higher authority, with the ultimate goal of seeking a decision by the Insurance Industry Ombudsman.

I guess they sensed our determination, and within the bounds of their internal workings, gave ground.

It was the fact that we had to be so steadfastly determined that gave me such bad feelings about dealing with the insurance company. We felt that we were just case URASK4MM3R, being processed by a hardworking person who was not being paid to care. It seemed too, that he was not being backed up by a supervisor who could help him make tricky judgement calls, timely decisions, or even encourage him to contact us regularly to inform us of the progress of our claim. It was truly exhausting emotionally, and at one time we even thought we might need the services of a solicitor (ugh)! Thankfully, we just took stock of our situation, planned and executed that plan.

But seriously, what else could we have expected? I think that I will write to their public affairs office, maybe I can H.E.L.P. them improve their service focus.

Have you had a bad experience with an insurance company? Leave a comment.