Insurance Covering letter

ACG

Is this the norm...

I bought a car yesterday. It had no road tax. So i started my insurance policy yesterday and then was all set to get road tax today.

I called them up expecting to be able to get a copy of it emailed over. They said no it can only be faxed but to top it off there is a £10.60 charge!

£10 to send a fax seems like daylight robbery.

kingstreet

AFAIK a post office or traffic office will only accept an original certificate of insurance, so it's moot about the fax.

Asking an insurer to do anything "special" carries a charge. Whether £10 is reasonable or not is hard to say. Sheilas Wheels charges £26 for a reprinted certificate, which I suppose is on a par with your request?

glider3560

I used to work for an insurance company who would issue cover notes for free (unless the customer wanted next day delivery, which we passed on at cost price of £4-something).

It typically took about thirty minutes time off the phone to process one of these, with meant I could potentially lose another two new customers. This was the process:
1. Confirm with customer where the cover note should be sent.
2. Go downstairs to get the cover note pad.
3. Seek out a manager to "release" the pad to me and note down in a book the serial number of the newest note (the pad had to be very carefully controlled as it would effectively allow me to issue anyone with 14 days of insurance, for which the company would be liable)
4. Go back upstairs.
5. Bring up the customer's details on my system.
6. Manually write all the details onto the pad.
7. Check the details.
8. Fetch a manager to check the details and countersign the cover note.
9. Go back downstairs to return the cover note pad.
10. Find another manager to sign the pad back in.
11. Back upstairs.
12. Find a fax machine.
13. Fight with the fax machine to get it sent through (never worked first time!)
14. Make a note on the computer system that a note was issued.
15. Write out two envelopes (one to the customer, one to the archives team).
16. Put the original note in envelope to customer, other in archives envelope.
17. Go to the post basket to post the note. Or, if the customer wanted next day delivery, go to the post room in another building.
18. (Optional) Fetch a cup of coffee to recover from this ordeal.
19. Back on the phone, having lost thirty minutes of my time and potential sales (and therefore down on my targets).

More than "just sending a fax"!

ACG

I called the post office, they said they would accept a fax.

Ive paid them £1500+ i can call and speak to their customer services for free but if they have to do anything then i have to pay for it? Another of her replies was "we include one lot of paperwork for free" ... theres me thinking it was including in the price.

Ive never written a letter of complaint before, but i feel quite strongly about this. Its only £10 i know but it takes someone 5-10 minutes to print and fax something. So unless their staff are on £60 an hour doing admin work then theyre profiteering from it.

glider3560

ACG wrote: »

I called the post office, they said they would accept a fax.

These became acceptable back in 2010.

ACG wrote: »

Ive never written a letter of complaint before, but i feel quite strongly about this. Its only £10 i know but it takes someone 5-10 minutes to print and fax something. So unless their staff are on £60 an hour doing admin work then theyre profiteering from it.

I hate to say it, but didn't you check something like this before you bought the policy? Every customer I had who wanted one of these always checked before buying! Also, see my post above about how long it takes. I think £10 is a reasonable amount to cover thirty minutes work.

ACG

I dont imagine LV have to go and look for a fax machine or manually write anything out.

Im guessing its either automatically generated or a template to add my name and details. Im guessing there is nothing more than 10 minutes work.

glider3560

ACG wrote: »

I dont imagine LV have to go and look for a fax machine or manually write anything out.

Im guessing its either automatically generated or a template to add my name and details. Im guessing there is nothing more than 10 minutes work.

But you are speculating. I wouldn't have thought it would take this long either with the company I used to work for, but it really does! Cover notes are so tightly controlled because any errors/fraud could prove very costly for the insurance company.

ACG

So they write from scratch every covering letter?
If thats the case i will take my comments back.

However a company that turns over god knows how many millions each year i would suspect have some processes automated.

kingstreet

Insurers are trimming their car rates all the time to try to stay at the top of the pops on the aggregator sites. Every time they make a cut in one area, they find a way of retaining profitability on another. If the rates are increased to cover the cost of non-essential administration issues, everyone pays and they fall down the table.

By charging for stuff only needed by a smaller percentage of the clientele they pi$$ off fewer customers.

As a customer myself, I accept there may be times I need to make changes so I use an insurer which isn't the cheapest but it doesn't charge for mid-term changes or other admin issues. It also doesn't charge for payment in instalments.

Just as when we recommend a mortgage, we (should) take into account things other than the bottom-line cost in choosing our car insurer, such as excess and other charges.

ACG

True. I suppose i have found out the (not so) hard way what to look for and will take greater care in the future.

I just seen the company name and it was a very reputable company who i recommend some of my clients to for IP and CI etc. Hey ho, it was only £10 so its not an expensive mistake but im still quite annoyed at the charge. Ive written my letter of complaint and posted it anyway. I made sure i had no bookings today as i anticipated issues so it gave me time to write the letter

InsideInsurance

ACG wrote: »

So they write from scratch every covering letter?
If thats the case i will take my comments back.

However a company that turns over god knows how many millions each year i would suspect have some processes automated.

A couple of years ago anyway, one of the largest car insurers in the UK weren't writing them out by hand but there was no automated way of sending them out by fax or email.

The "problem" was their systems run on batch processes so you buy today and overnight a program ran extracting all the information, generating the letter/ cert etc. The next night a second batch process ran which sent all the letters to the warehouse sized building that does all the printing. It then sits in a queue until a line is switched to new business packs and then gets printed. The mail from the 20+ brands and 100+ products the group produced got then sorted into distribution office and bagged for to be taken to the correct office at the next time the UK Mail lorry turned up - was more than once a day!

To step outside of that process for one of their brands they had a Lotus Notes database which only the three customer service managers had access to, so you had to find which of those were available, put all the details onto a form and give it to them. They checked what was on it matched what was on the system. They completed it and it triggered an email to the Admin team.

Admin team had to disconnect a printer and load it with different paper. They then printed the certificate. The call centre rep then had to go to the admin team and collect the certificate and then either take it to the post room for a SD sending or fax it out and then take it to the post room for sending to archives.

All in all easily a 30 minute job and involving at least 4 people including team managers, customer service managers etc. Whilst the rep is spending the 30 minutes doing that they also aren't on the phones selling so you have lost business.


The issue is that it is fairly rarely done, a few a day at most in an organisation with circa 8,000 sales and service call centre people. Because of the "risk" of printing certificates of insurance a lot of controls need to be in place, a rogue agent could otherwise take backhanders from those driving uninsured and having an at fault accident create a certificate of insurance predating the accident and thus the insurer would potentially legally have to handle the claim.

A system to handle this sort of thing given there was no workflow engine in place is probably £1-1.5m.... the question is for the sake of a few customers a day are you going to see a return on your £1.5m or are you better off spending that money on some ITV1 adverts or a whole campaign of DM?