Rsa echoice. Be aware...

dagwood_2

My experiance with Echoice!! Where do i start, after having to renew my insurance, i went on the internet and thought echoice were doing a good deal, so decided to fill in the appropiate paperwork on line. Once i had entered all the details and got to the checkout after paying my £50 deposit and setting up the direct debit details, there system flashed up as experecing problems and try again later. I checked with my bank the following day and the £50 had been taken. I called echoice and was promised a call back after checking my details, although as yet i still didnt have a policy number or a reference number to quote to them! Nobody called me back. It took me calling them 5 times and sending 2 emails (to which none of them were replied to) to call back and demand something be done, they kept refering to an "accounts trace", and until this had been completed they couldnt issue me with an email so i could down load my policy and tax my car. The poor chap kept saying he would ring me back if i didnt want to hold, there was no way i was letting him go without an answer. After waiting 27 minutes on hold, he said he had spoken with the accounts department and they couldnt issue the policy to me for a further 5 working days due to a paperwork trail..... was there anything else they could do to help he asked??? was there ever... i instructed him to cancel the whole charade, refund me the £50 deposit and forget the whole damn incident. How long would it take to refund the £50.00... 3-5 working days. I cannot believe a company can do this to people. This has cost a fortune in phone calls, unnecessary worry and the inconvience of having to go to two different banks, one to try and get a refund on the £50.00 and the other to instruct the bank not to let echoice withdraw moneies via direct debit, which im still not sure if they intend on doing, so another visit to the bank next week. I have been driving for over 20 years and in all that time i have never quite come accross an insurance company who have been so unhelpful. There lack of communication & promises astounds me. Avoid at all costs, this has cost me money and my sanity, thankfully i didnt choose to pay all in one go. But thanks to echoice i cannot tax my car for another month now as i dont have enough money to put down another deposit until they decide when to reimburse me. And lord only knows how long thats going to take... if its going by there promise to call me back, then i could be waiting for a very long time.
Lets hope they dont try and take a cancellation fee from the £50.00 deposit although there never has been a policy set up in the first place.
I will keep you informed as to how this pantomime panns out!..................................................................................
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UPDATE.... GOT BACK DEPOSIT.......AS PROMISED.......................
Have been told to send in my phone bill to see if they will pay back my
call charges. Aprox £8 , as i never got a policy set up, i think its only fair for all the stress... Will update again soon.

April_George

My recent experience of RSA ECHOICE is awful, I don't know how they are allowed to get away with it. I recently purchased Car Insurance through them because they were the cheapest option on 'GO COMPARE'. However, I have now changed my car a month later and they want to charge me £78.76 for the priviledge of doing this. However if I use the GO Compare site again and put the details of my new car in , surprise, surprise they are the cheapest again. But the difference in premium of what I paid for my old car and the new car is only £13.00. Yes, you could say there is an admin cost involved, but no because I log in to the website and into my account and actually do this myself! So can anybody explain their justification for charging £65.76 to change it. What do they have to do? I could just cancel the policy all together, but that would cost me £70 in cancellation fees, and even then you don't know when you'd get your premium returned.

So be warned, they may initially look like the deal breaker, but once they've got you and you want to change anything they sting you.

For the record I've avoided their Customer Services and emailed their CEO instead. I will provide an update to this when I have it.

UPDATE. ++++++++

Prompt email response. Agreed to waiver any increase. Satisfactory response. ������

Mark76mcr

I have, as most that have chosen RSA eChoice - chosen the cheapest price over the compare.com website. After a whole year with no claims - nor contact with them - I have moved over to a new insurer and contacted eChoice asking for the cancelation of the automatic renewal and for a no claim bonus certificate to be issued. The lady at the customer services (which does not work on Saturdays) has agreed to the cancelation and when asked for a reference number, informed me that I would not need to worry although there was no reference number to the cancelation request over the telephone. For my joy and entertainment a couple days later I have been charged £206.00 on direct debt and have now to chase them up for a refund. During the cancelation I have informed RSA eChoice that the vehicle was insured elsewhere and this clearly means THEY CAN NOT OFFER COVER FOR A VEHICLE ALREADY INSURED!!! They call themselves eChoice but the website never works - login in is a nightmare. They will not post you a renewal offer - as the Customer Care Lady explains, they are an on-line insurance provider and you must use the website...yes, the one that does not work lol - to look for your renewal offer. Now the fun starts, as if life is not already full of little annoying complications, there also eChoice to add some extra excitement in the form of "having to chase your £200 that got taken right from your bank account". Well this must be the price for the CHEAP-CHOICE! Lesson learnt. I will keep updating as I have NO-CHOICE but keep on dealing with them... I know, it's not funny!

william17

i have just tried to insure my car. i got to the part when it asks for bank details and then clicked to go on the next page for paying deposit. it wouldnt work.so now they have my bank details and i have no insurance.why do they have no contact telephone numbers. what a joke this site is. i have emailed them as it asks for support but had no reply. i noticed there was a phone number that someone had put up on here for them but it wont connect.

william17

i have just spent 20 minutes trying to pay.couldnt get on.cant contact them by phone but managed to find a chat line. after another 20 minutes was told they only give phone numbers to existing customers . i cannot be a existing customer as i cant pay for my insurance. what sort of firm is this which will not let you have a phone number. i see on here somewhere someone called katie says she works for rsa echoice and has put up a number, it is not valid. how can you trust a firm like this.

Toypop

I have been having nightmares with these scammers and found this thread by searching google to see if I was the only one.

The main problem is that this insurance company is supposed to be online-only and they make it very difficult to contact them on the phone - limited hours and huge queues etc.

Now this would be great but for the fact that their website doesn't work 90% of the time and as I see from Google most people get the same error messages as me whenever you try to do something. Nothing to do with my PC by the way, it happens the same on my desktop or laptop.

I had nightmares trying to renew my car - I got a letter AFTER I had renewed it online saying they hadn't received payment and that they would cancel my insurance even though the money had long been taken off my card. I had to rack up a large phone bill calling them to clear it up (they said it was a mistake on their part) but I still felt stressed and uncertain as to whether I really was insured.

Upon buying another car I ran into even more issues with their website being down or having problems that they are "working on" all the time.

After spending ages queueing on the phone (AGAIN) I got them to change my car over barely in time for me to collect it. They actually promised me a small rebate (new car was much lower insurance group) and assured me that I was insured.

Months later I was messing around on the Askmid website and see that my car comes up as uninsured!!! I logged onto the echoice site and it was still showing my old car as being insured and there wasn't an insurance certificate for the new one either! So I had been driving a new car with no insurance for months! Had I been involved in an accident or the police pulled me over do you think they would believe my story about the person on the phone assuring me that I was covered?!

Of course I cannot change the car myself on their website as it is still giving errors and I cannot get them on the phone as it is outside office hours.

I cancelled my policy (got another website error but it went through) and tell me what do you guys think the odds are that I will actually get the refund (minus a huge a great cancellation penalty)??? Not holding my breath but if they mess me around on this too they will be VERY sorry believe me...

Please anyone reading this do not ever buy insurance from these cowboys. Their website doesn't work, it updates too slowly, both the site and the phone operatives cannot be trusted, are nearly impossible to speak to and you will be left stressed and worried about whether you have insurance or not.

weejonnie

What is that phrase again?

Buy cheap - buy twice.

Or you might like this quote

"There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little more cheaply and those who consider price alone are this person's lawful prey"

Quentin

weejonnie wrote: »

What is that phrase again?

Buy cheap - buy twice.

Or you might like this quote

"There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little more cheaply and those who consider price alone are this person's lawful prey"

Yet again you seize on a newbie's post to tell us your "you should use a broker" mantra.

(Though again you neglect to point out you are a broker!)

The thread is about an incompetent insurer. Are brokers never incompetent, then?

mutley74

Is echoice really that bad?

I have been witnh More than for a few years and find the service okay although never claimed but prices seemed to have rocketed this year, and echoice was coming at least £40 cheaper (as they are underwritteb by same company).

nigelwest

I renewed my car insurance with them in February 2012, they weren't the cheapest, but only a few pounds more.

Couldn't renew online because their website didn't work, and was assured on the phone that it was a temporary problem.

In April I changed my car and still can't access the website, continually getting the message "Our site appears to be having a few problems, but don't worry - we're working hard to fix it. Please try again soon." in different browsers and different computers.

Spent 20 minutes on the phone changing vehicles and asked for the insurance certificate to be posted.

Insurance certificate turns up with the old car registration number. Letter is addressed correctly, but salutation is Mrs West.

As it's a Saturday and their phone lines are closed, I send an email, partly worried about whether I'm insured or not. On Monday (bank holiday) in frustration I send another email complaining about the website failures.

On Tuesday morning I receive a reply to my second email asking me to phone them, between 9am & 5pm. I decline and ask they phone me, and get the reply that they don't have a call back facility.

No reply to the "am I insured" email, which I think is quite important.

Letters sent to the customer manager who sent the wrong certificate and Adrian Brown, but having seen the problems other people are having I don't expect a reply as RSA clearly don't care about their customers.

In addition to their website not working, irrespective of the time of day you try to get on it, their Twitter feed @RSAeChoice is a waste of time too.

RSA/eChoice advertise that their service as: "RSA echoice has been designed as an online product, with online servicing available to put you in control of your policy 24/7." This must be breaking some sort of advertising regulation.

Basically avoid eChoice like the plague, I hate to think what would happen if you had to claim.

The lesson I've learnt is to check the review sites before taking out car insurance. Big doesn't mean better.

nigelwest

A couple of days of Twitter bashing has finally worked - I have had a phone call from eChoice.

The issue of whether my new car is insured has been answered (it is) and a new certificate is to be sent out. They promised to call in 10 days to check whether the certificate has arrived and is correct.

The website is another problem and I had the same explanation that I had in February, so I strongly suspect there are some fundamental problems with it.