quote me happy? Serve me badly!

griffster

My mother-in-law recently used comparethemarket.com to get a new car insurance quote. She went for quotemehappy.com as being the best quotation. Once the purchase had gone through she was then asked a while later to provide proof of her previous No Claims bonus from her previous insurer. She was unable to locate this so contact her previous insurer for a duplicate/letter.

In the meantime, she received a final notice from quotemehappy stating if she didn't send it in by the 15th of October then the policy will be cancelled and she'd be liable for a cancellation fee of £55 + a proportion of the overall payment to cover the term of insurance between policy start and the 15th of October.

The previous insurer stated it would take around 10 days to get to her which was too late for the 15th of october deadline. We therefore tried to contact quotemehappy to tell them it's on its way and not to cancel. It was at this point it appeared how hopeless and frustrating their website is. There are no phone numbers at all on the website, and the only means of contacting them is via email. Going to the email contact page, there's a notice on there saying, due to an unforeseen number of emails there is a big delay with emails at the moment so they're unable to process any more i.e. the email functionality doesn't work at present. The only other way I found was to go in to the complaints page and send them the detail as part of a complaint, stating this was our only method of informing them that the NCD proof was on its way.

We did this well before the 15th deadline. NO CONTACT BY EMAIL FROM THEM IN RETURN! So, we logged in to her quotemehappy.com account only to find they'd gone ahead and cancelled the policy. More importantly, we are yet to see her money refunded. AGAIN, we're unable to contact them via email page as it's still down, so no means of contact STILL. TRULY APPALLING SERVICE. On further inspection, it turns out that they are part of the Aviva group, which accounts for how bad the service is frankly.

I found an email address on one forum for someone at quotemehappy and sent that person the NCD proof and explained our situation as a last resort but we hold out little faith in this process.

In the meantime, how do we ensure we get the full amount refunded please if we're unable to contact them in any way? I don't think we should pay the cancellation fee either due to the incompetence. We're going to have to fork out another lot of money to another insurer now while we wait for this to be resolved as she's now uninsured! Very much doubt their going to re-activate the insurance as it stands. Ridiculous!

InsideInsurance

You have bigger issues than the refund.... she has now had insurance cancelled and must declare this to her new insurers - most mainstream insurers wont touch her now and those that will massively load the premiums!

QuoteMeHappy is the low cost arm of Aviva, evidently you accept the lower price is in part achieved by not having call centre operations and all communications being driven via email and so there has to be some acceptance of this when you buy from them.

Of cause to have an email only contact method and then the email contact method goes down for an extended period clearly is a significant issue and good grounds for complaint.

As to refunds - you are at the mercy of the banking system here, card refunds take 3-5 working days to show and the likihood will be that the policy is cancelled on the 15th and so the refund process will occur on the 16th and so it should show in the account no later than the 24th all things being equal (and making some assumptions)

There are exceptions but generally the cheapest are the cheapest for a reason!

griffster

Thanks for the reply. That's utterly ridiculous seeing it's not our fault, more a combination of quotemehappy and the previous insurer's 10-day wait. Don't they take these sort of issues in to account when providing insurance cover?

InsideInsurance wrote: »

You have bigger issues than the refund.... she has now had insurance cancelled and must declare this to her new insurers - most mainstream insurers wont touch her now and those that will massively load the premiums!

QuoteMeHappy is the low cost arm of Aviva, evidently you accept the lower price is in part achieved by not having call centre operations and all communications being driven via email and so there has to be some acceptance of this when you buy from them.

Of cause to have an email only contact method and then the email contact method goes down for an extended period clearly is a significant issue and good grounds for complaint.

As to refunds - you are at the mercy of the banking system here, card refunds take 3-5 working days to show and the likihood will be that the policy is cancelled on the 15th and so the refund process will occur on the 16th and so it should show in the account no later than the 24th all things being equal (and making some assumptions)

There are exceptions but generally the cheapest are the cheapest for a reason!

InsideInsurance

Generally, no.

For Car insurance in particular, margins are very thin and it is all about cost reduction and driving through volume. As a result you have deskilled call centre agents, systems with a binary yes/ no answer etc all allowing straight through processing etc rather than empowered advisors speaking to underwriters making informed decisions, doing investigations to validate statements and systems allowing them to apply custom endorsements or premium adjustments etc

tonyttt

It seems that the way quotemehappy operates is almost like a scam. I took out a car insurance policy with them, and a few days later, just as the policy came into force was told I would have to send them a scan or photo of my No Claims Discount. I did scan this and sent it. About 3 days later I get an email saying that it cannot be read or is unclear. THIS IS A COMPLETE LIE! It is a scan sent from my PC scanner and is crystal clear. I sent another scan, and again 3 days later the same email. I then decided to cancel the policy, and therefore had to pay their cancellation fee (perhaps this is how they make their money). I have now renewed with the RAC. I sent them the same No Claims Proof, which of course they have accepted.

I also had problems changing my password - which they were completely unable to fix. Stay away from this company at all cost!