Aviva, problems following accident

InsideInsurance

I think you've miss read what I said, I said insurers want to make profit - didnt say or insinuate that they werent currently making profits.

On the DLG front, they were asking for circa £8b for the group whilst it was up for sale and they now expect to get a £3b valuation from the float - not exactly a loss but certainly significantly lower than it was - saying that profits have slumped from nearly £1b to £0.3b ish

Retaining customers doesnt automatically mean more profits though even if it means less costs; it all depends on what you are having to do to keep those customers.

Insurers spend a hell of a lot of money on trying to work out the things like propensity models and customer elasticity and build it into their pricing models and rating engines. All to try and answer the questions of "if we increase the prices by X% we will lose Y customers but the impact to the bottom line is Z"

It is certainly possible to lose customers but take more revenue - you just need to have a good understanding of the above to work out the numbers X, Y & Z

2010

RBS have taken £1bn out of the business before the sale, that`s probably why the valuation is lower.
They are only floating it because they are being forced to do so.

All insurance companies spend an absolute fortune advertising but at the same time are incapable of retaining their customers.
Less spent on ads and more on customer service might help retain them.

Overseas call centres are a disaster and now a lot of firms are switching back to the UK.
Foreigners don`t understand slang and local dialects, and quite often we don`t understand them.

It would be interesting to see figures on how quickly UK centres solve customer`s queries and problems compared to overseas.

It doesn`t add up if an overseas call takes three times as long to answer.

andygb

Thanks for all your help everyone.
Rachel I will email you ASAP.

Williewonthe

Andygb, I have just come on to this thread to check out opinions of Aviva (I'm about to insure a new car and Aviva is one of the three companies I WAS considering - now it's TWO) and your post is invaluable to me.

Firstly, it has told me that if I have to contact them re a claim, the chances are that I will have to talk to someone in India (I, too, have problems understanding what they say, as well as getting the feeling - from the experiences I have so far of call-centres there - that they just read of a crib sheet - maybe this does not apply to Aviva but it certainly applies to other companies with which I now no longer deal.)
Secondly it tells me that I may pull out the rest of my hair trying to talk to the correct person for what I need.
Even though Aviva was the cheapest of the three quotes, maybe you get what you pay for, they are now out of the running.

InsideInsurance

2010 wrote: »

It would be interesting to see figures on how quickly UK centres solve customer`s queries and problems compared to overseas

Cannot give any figures as never worked on any offshoring customer service departments but I am currently working on centralising and offshoring a back office process globally.

The below were the number of cases per full time employee processed in each country:

UK: 10

France: 9
Germany: 12
Italy: 8
Spain: 9
Sweden: 11
USA: 15

Offshore: 8

So, certainly with this process the offshore guys are slower than the UK but are having to deal with circa 15 languages.

However the UK are massively slower than the USA and there is no excuse for them about having foreign languages to deal with

andygb

InsideInsurance wrote: »

Cannot give any figures as never worked on any offshoring customer service departments but I am currently working on centralising and offshoring a back office process globally.

The below were the number of cases per full time employee processed in each country:

UK: 10

France: 9
Germany: 12
Italy: 8
Spain: 9
Sweden: 11
USA: 15

Offshore: 8

So, certainly with this process the offshore guys are slower than the UK but are having to deal with circa 15 languages.

However the UK are massively slower than the USA and there is no excuse for them about having foreign languages to deal with

Don't you guys ever consider how the customer will react to this, because we really need people to be able to understand us first time. It would seem that the only thing that you think about is money/profit, which comes at the expense of customer satisfaction.
The other big problem, is that we have a massive unemployment problem in the UK, so I personally despise people like yourself, who take jobs away from UK workers.

InsideInsurance

As I say, in the above example it is a back office function and so the customer will be totally oblivious to it. I personally don't like offshored customer service call centres and predominately pick providers that dont use them.

Companies only thinking about profit? With a few exceptions then I would argue all companies are 95% the same on this. Anything about social policy or green credentials are typically both cost constrained and effectively a PR/ IR exercise

As to taking jobs from British workers - there are 4 people doing this function in a central london office. There are 3 people doing the same in a central Paris office. There are 15 people doing it in a central New York office. Plus more in every country the organisation has offices in

It is highly inefficient to have circa 50 small teams working in different countries doing the same job with no shared workloads etc. The overheads of trying to share work across 65 different countries with differing data protection laws and other political considerations (try telling Israel that their data will be processed in Dubai etc) would be a nightmare and would still result in jobs going somewhere for the basic staff.

So it is fairly obvious the work needs to be centralised into a single team with circa 80 staff. Obviously you say we should steal the jobs from the USA and place them here but then we would be asking the USA to pay a higher cost for staff that are less productive than the ones they already have.... how well do you think that would fly with the department managers let alone people who are considered about company profits?

2010

Well I`m with Aviva for car and home insurance but didn`t realise that they had overseas call centres until I read the OP.
On renewal I will not be staying with them for that reason.

Maybe if everyone did the same they would soon have UK only call centres.

andygb

Well, after receiving a return email yesterday, nobody from Aviva has actually spoken to me, so I am less than impressed.
Mind you, I suppose that I have to take into account the time difference between the UK and India:(

InsideInsurance

Cant speak for Aviva but not normally offshore operations are made to work the hours of their clients timezone