"pay As You Go" Car Insurance (norwich Union)

beccus wrote: »

Its really interesting to see what people think about PAYD, please keep posting your thoughts here so I can pass them onto my colleagues.

Becca

Can you advise on the following.

Just over a week ago, a friend applied to Norwich Union for car insurance and was quoted for only the regular car insurance policy. By chance, she rang in again and was told by the Customer Service Rep that with the miles my friend said she drives in a year the PAYD policy would be cheaper.

This seems strange. Is this how it should work?

Is it the customer's own responsibility to know which car insurance policies NU sells and which specific one suits them best?

Is it NU's policy to sell the customer a policy with a higher premium than necessary if it seems the customer will not be looking elsewhere for quotations?

Although my friend converted to the PAYD policy she was now in a position where she did not really know if the second CSR was right in the way she had calculated the premium cost because my friend had already learnt that one Norwich Union CSR was never going to receive her trust again when it came to advice on how best to save money when purchasing NU car insurance.

The first CSR had already arranged for the paperwork to be sent out, so an extra set of papers with a change of policy were issued.

I will for now ignore the errors in the paperwork which in themselves have caused separate and continuing problems. I will only mention that the start time was different to what was requested, surnames were misspelt, the place the car was parked mysteriously changed, etc. When the corrections were applied by Norwich Union they were themselves incorrect and before long there were masses of unexpected seemingly duplicate paperwork arriving which all needed checking to see that it was in fact genuinely duplicate. All this in less than 10 days!

I should add that my friend is a very clear speaker and stated her personal details unambiguously. She is patient, un-argumentative and, in general, she is a model customer.

Now that she was facing the unnecessary administration, my friend decided not to ask any more about the PAYD compared to the standard policy. It was getting to be too much. However she did want to know what excess she should specify on the to-be-corrected paperwork. A quick call to the helpline was indeed quick because this time the helpline person didn't know much about how the premium changed according to what excess was applied. Indeed, my friend was told she should have asked the sales people. Well, she would certainly have done so if she knew there was going to be some jiggery pokery with the excess but at the time she was too trusting in NU's processes. In fairness the first CSR had given her clear information about these figures which my friend wrote down but unfortunately the errors which led to an incorrect premium, now made these written figures incorrect. She never got an answer to her query.

All in all PAYD may be a good policy but my friend will be thinking twice if she deals with NU again when the policy is up for renewal as she is usually extremely busy and does not have a lot of time to spare on this sort of protracted admin. Anyone else who values their time may want to think how much value they put on several hours of their time spent dealing with NU to correct errors and see if the cost they put on that does not make alternatives seem more attractive than they would otherwise have been.

My friend would make a complaint to Norwich Union but, as she has already seen how the company's admin works, she is reluctant to get mired in a complaints system with yet more misunderstandings, incorrect paperwork, poor investigation and all that sort of thing which she has already experienced. Her personal time is far too precious for all that. Needless to say all this has caused her quite considerable distress.

Why can't she ring in, give all her details, get a quote and take out insurance. Dozens of car insurers can manage to do this so what is so hard about it for Norwich Union to give my friend a similar standard of service?

Becca, are you able to offer any comments on what my friend has experienced? Of course, it's no consolation to be told that this is rare or not because it is the actual one-and-only experience my friend had.

Dogruler