Prince Humperdinck, the Spartans and insurance

 Occasionally I read complaints made about the insurance industry and find myself sniggering or ‘tut-tutting’ in half belief that the people who are complaining really couldn’t have been subject to the sorts of behaviour they allege insurance companies commit simply because these insurance companies are very large, sophisticated organisations who would simply not be capable of the sorts of idiocy described. 

Maybe on occasion an insurer may make the odd mistake or, perhaps more likely, the person complaining about the insurance company is themselves at fault, either being too impatient with their claim or expecting way too much from their insurance company.

In fact I tell my children all of the time not to be cynical about the world and to treat people as if they will act honourably until they find themselves confronted by somebody who plainly does not. They can then be legitimately surprised and momentarily dismayed.

After this last two weeks I now tell my children to expect honour from all but insurance companies.

I have formed the view that insurance companies are very similar to the Wizard of Oz:  Magnificent in representing on TV how responsive and caring they are once misfortune has been visited upon one of their precious policy holders but in reality they are better represented by the little man behind the curtain putting the preponderance of his effort into creating the illusion (Charter-boat? What charter-boat?) and comparatively little into actually doing the job they portray themselves as doing so well in their advertisements.

Complaints about insurance companies are so commonplace and indiscriminate among insurers that they now have no impact at all. They have become the equivalent of white noise.  They are as old as time.  Long before London seized and organised the modern insurance market in the 18^th century, history has, frowned upon those who bet against misfortune at a distorted price.

Shakespeare’s Shylock was his way of describing the insurers of the time.  A despised character who begged audiences to see his real humanity.  Countless royal families have offered protection for a price.

I accept that while we do paint insurers as the bad guy, they do occasionally do benevolent and expensive acts at their own cost.  After trawling (a lot) through history I found the example of Prince Humperdinck the insurer in ‘Princess Bride’. No one thought of the cost to him of sending the four ships to the four corners of the kingdom to check the safety of Buttercup’s true love, Wesley.

I can also accept that it may well be the case that your particular circumstances are indeed difficult to deal with and may be the root of delay and difficulty which an insurer will need to commit the 2% of their workforce assigned to dealing with claims to overcome.

The fact that they do make up such a small part of the insurers’ workforce is misleading.  These people are really the Spartans of the insurance sector.  Not described so because of their much psychotic lack of empathy but the fact that they can do the work of ten (largely because they must) with no dent of inefficiency or lack of control.

Just take a look at those capable and impossibly glowing call centre operators in the ads.  So in-control and omnipotent. Almost patronisingly so. You simply cannot imagine any of them rolling their eyes or making choking gestures as they speak to you.

(Actually after this week I can.  I am sure mine has RSI in both eyes because of it.)

I understand that insurance companies, while they may promise a lot more in their advertising, really only do that which they are contractually obliged to do, and that is to pay you money or replace the items should the conditions of their insurance contract be met.  I have no illusions in this regard and don’t count myself amongst the Hillbillies who believe that when they pay their premiums and stuff happens insurers will swoop in to make everything right.  It is simply a commercial bet that certain things won’t happen.

My difficulty really is in the management of claims. This is the focus of the insurers advertising and part of the ‘product’ they are selling.  While you may contract with an insurer to pay you should certain events occur (not too dissimilar to a day at the races) there seems to be no real obligation on the insurer to do so in a way which recognises that you are a human being or anything other than one premium payer of the millions in the market herd.

So, to get to the point, we were burgled last week.  Thankfully all that was taken was a few electronic devices.  While the theft of work laptops and my daughter’s iPod can be really inconvenient (particularly to a child who like most other children her age lives primarily in the virtual world) I know it could have been far worse.

So we dug out the insurance policy and made the claim by using their website as they suggest. This seemingly benign strategy was my first mistake.  After completing the claim I was issued with a receipt number for the complaint. I kept it and popped it in a shiny manila folder thinking that this would be the key to restoration of my and my family’s damaged lives.  Stupidly I thought this number had some relevance to my claim. I now realise my folly. (Trust nothing, trust no-one).

But I digress. Having finished the claim I felt a comfortable glow, even a warm feeling of satisfaction that I had dealt with the loss and my family would soon be back on its feet with each happy little face fixated to the screens increasingly less recently taken by the burglars.

I waited for the telephone call promised me within four working hours in the receipt. Four working hours came and went and there was no call.  While I immediately thought that something awful may have happened the cynical side of me began to fear the worst.

I called the, (perhaps it’s aspirational) ‘helpline’, and was asked for my precious reference number which I gave in a suitably proud and reverent tone. However Ah-Ah-Annabel told me in her accented tone (which I took to be a native Spartan lilt) that this was not the correct reference number but simply the receipt number for my claim. After a brief pause to reprogram Ah-Ah-Annabel’s voice then morphed from Spartan to a sort of strained Kindergarten teacher post-2.30 pm tone. I dutifully accepted that the reference number I was provided had no real relevance to anything terrestrial so, borrowed phone (mine was no doubt at this time being used to access Porn) perched precariously on my shoulder, I thumbed through dusty documents to pull out the policy number which I had previously fed into the website claims process – apparently in a pure act of futility and optimism.

I was then told Ah-Ah-Annabel (not her real name – just one she uses) that the claim had been received and that I should have received an email (which I didn’t).  She called herself ‘My claims manager’ which I am sure is just modesty.  I am sure that despite the fact that the company has countless employees who are prepared to provide you with quotes for insurance and to receive your money, all claims in the Australasian region go through Ah Ah Annabel to process.  (Such is her capacity I feel the need to refer to her as ‘AAA’).

AAA then promised me that she would re-send me the email which also failed to arrive. That too went astray. AAA should perhaps have used the email address I gave them instead of freelancing with the scrabble board.  After another telephone conversation, again with AAA, her email finally hit my computer.  It told me what I needed to do to prove my claim.  It wasn’t hard; there weren’t that many items to be claimed and details to be gathered.  Within a space of 24 hours I provided her with statutory declarations, photographs of manuals and receipts and also photos of free spaces previously occupied by the missing items (An attempt at humour I now know would have been lost on the Spartan race).

I waited a few days and then it happened.

When I say then ‘It’ happened what I mean is nothing happened.  At all.

No progress of the claim, no acknowledgement of the correspondence or even a whimsical comment about my blank space-on-the-desk-humour.

After a time, and fearing the worst, I jumped online to see if AAA’s company still existed.  My relief was palpable when the website came up.  Celebrating their survival I rang the help line – which I have since dubbed the ‘helpless line’ – it seems only fair’  and had a further discussion – this time with a gentleman who must have been filling in for AAA who was busy convincing the Tin Man that a suitably shaped alarm clock was an appropriate replacement for a human heart.

This time Ah-Ah-Anthony assured me given the small number of items contained within the claim the matter would be dealt with quickly and that I should put myself in a state of readiness to ensure that I get maximum value out of my brand new laptop when it arrived within 48 hours.

Four days now.

I have kept a watch on AAA’s company on a daily basis to assure myself of its health.  To a certain extent I have given up and I have dented my new credit card paying (again) for my daughter’s iPod as it was a birthday present only a few days old and I felt the need to reverse her disappointment and attempt to reduce her anxiety from the burglary.

My laptop -which is my tool for running my life and my wife’s phone which is also a tool for running my life, remain undisturbed on shelves at JB HiFi.

So at this point we have no indication that the claim will be accepted and without my calls to the ‘hapless line’ I’m sure that I would have had no contact from the insurer at all.

Now that my credit cards have arrived and I needn’t go to the bank and plead with the teller for money I have been able to put things into a bit more perspective and reflect upon the situation.

Maybe my expectations have been too high.  Maybe it is a fair thing that an insurance company, once apprised of all the facts can really take two or three weeks to pay what is a relatively small and very clean claim.

I have decided at this stage simply to wait and fire the occasional phone call to Spartan central.

I did think however that maybe this was the universe’s way of telling me that I should look around for other insurers and test whether my experience is something which should make me move my business. 

By this stage I wasn’t doing this as a spiteful act thinking that by taking my meagre premium to another insurer AAA would need to notify the ASX.  After all, I suspect that I am black marked in any event.  I have now, after all, made a claim and am therefore probably the sort of customer insurer’s want to avoid.

With my little bit of interweb surfing I couldn’t find any insurers who actually provide detail on their website of what a customer should expect while their claim is being processed. Things that would perhaps make me less suspicious that the insurer was moving at a pace untroubled by wanting to put the policy holder back on track:  Average claim processing times, whether the policy holder can expect to be responded to when they send correspondence, progress reports and so on. It is really about establishing expectations to avoid frustration.

I know that by buying an insurance product (BTW insurance companies actually produce nothing but again I digress) I am buying peace of mind and the capacity to restore my life after a bad event.  But I am also buying a claims service and this is reinforced by every insurance advertisement ever made:

Policy holders on the phone with smoking wrecks behind them; assessors wading through waist high water to get to policy holders.

I thought I would try to do it in a relatively scientific way by sending off four emails to four large insurance providers in Queensland asking them that if they had or some written promise that they would treat their customers reasonably during the claims process and acknowledgement that this was  part of what the customer was buying.

My responses so far have been

(a)          an automatic response indicating how much they truly loved me, valued every voiced breath and promising that a real person would contact me soon;

(b)          a second went one better – having a real person respond to my query and indicating honestly that they simply did not have a customer charter of rights but that I should refer to the Product Disclosure Statement.  I did have a look at this document thinking that I might have missed something and being quite prepared to feel embarrassed about this. I found however that the PDS is really just a document that parrots the policy of insurance.   There is nothing in the PDS to indicate how the insurer promises to deal with you (reasonably or at all) once the claim is made; and

(c)           the remaining two providers have not yet responded (battling out for third and fourth at this stage).

I think that service is part of an insurance ‘product’.  In fact I would even be prepared to pay a little more if an insurer made the sorts of promises on paper that they do in their ads.

It is certainly the case that I can march my insurer off to the court or go to the regulator to complain about a lack of service. By the time that builds up any momentum, the Spartans will have been marshalled, the claim will have paid, the premium adjusted accordingly and I will have returned to ‘Not-my-problem’ Street.

Interestingly as a final point I did continue my correspondence with one potential insurer once I knew that I had a real person on the end of the email.   I told her that I had read the PDS but that it really didn’t have the promise that I wanted to see. I was nice about it.  I asked whether in any of the documentation they provided when granting the blessing of insurance to one of their policy holders, they promised to treat their customers reasonably.  Unfortunately, this is where their facade popped its bamboo support and fluttered to the ground.

 The response was immediate and mechanised (or at least I hope it was).  It said:

‘Given the severe flooding in Queensland we will be unable to advise when we will be able to respond to action your enquiry.  We apologise for any inconvenience caused.’

I must admit I did, as a reflex reaction, look out the window, but I think they were talking about the 2011 floods.

So what does this mean?

Probably nothing.  It’s probably the case that it will all resolve itself over the next few weeks and like so many of me before I will lose the will to ask the question.

Incidentally, now that I think of it, Prince Humperdinck never did send those boats.

TJL 27/09/2012