When are insurance companies going to wake up and realise it’s no longer the 90s?
I needed to amend 2 policies this week, both with Saga. For some reason, my wife’s car is on my policy and my car is on her policy, and they need to be swapped over. As they are both with saga, and both in the online account, you would think, and hope, this would be not on do-able, but relatively straightforward? How wrong we can be.
I tried to do this online to start with in the my account portal. No option to amend the policy online. There was a live chat button, so I clicked that. Up comes their Bot. Not an actual live chat at all. Do Saga not realise who their target customer base are and how likely they are to feel towards being forced, or even conned, into using a bot?
Of course, no surprise the bot couldn’t do what I wanted, and was eventually passed to a live agent. He couldn’t transfer the policy holder. Nope, not allowed to do that I’m afraid. His advice? Have to cancel the policy and start a new one! Same for the one in my wife name
So I now go onto the comparison site, and start 2 new policies, with 2 new companies, both £100 cheaper, when frankly I would have been quite happy to just roll over the policies as they were mid-way through the year
The upshot is Saga have lost 2 customers, needlessly, through rigid poorly designed systems, that frustrated the agent even more then they frustrated me.
How many thousands of people have similar experiences every week? No wonder the comparison and switching markets in insurance are so fruitful.
Not just Saga either, had similar Computer Says No issues with Homebase the last couple of weeks. Ordered a new TV unit. It arrived damaged, so it had to go back. during which time the new TV arrived and I realised it was actually too small for the TV. So I contacted Homebase, via email. There was no number to actually call them of course…
I gave them the details of the new one I wanted, and was told the manufacturer would collect the damaged item and deliver the new one. Lorry turned up last Tuesday, to collect the damaged item, but the replacement they brought was the same wrong item, so it went back.
Back to the email. Several emails and several days later, I get advised yesterday, that its not actually possible to swap the items, they have to refund me the original item, and I have to go on their website or into store and re-order the new item as a new order.
Of course I get the usual apologies for the delay and thanks for shopping, but when did organisations stop empowering their people to actually do what customers need them to. It makes them look stupid and unhelpful, when to a customer they seem like straightforward and simple requests.
It’s called Customer Service for a reason
Onwards
