Disabling auto renew feature 'locks in' higher premium

trebsy

Auto renewal might be convenient for some but it might put you at a serious disadvantage depending on how and when you try to extricate yourself from it. 

I got notified of expiry of my existing policy 4 weeks out. But when I tried to use my on-line account to disable auto renewal, the option was no longer accessible. The only way to do it was to [queue] speak to someone on the phone. I was assured the auto renewal was now disabled but my web account still didn't confirm this. 

But I think there is a more subtle disadvantage to this than just the inconvenience of having to call them.

In the renewal quote, the home insurance provider shows last years premium and what my new one will be (an unwarranted £40 or 20% increase). I knew I could do better but first had to get the auto-renewal thing binned off to avoid paying twice. To my annoyance I couldn't do it on the web, nor by email, I had to phone them. I could however click 'renew' or take out pet insurance.

During that telephone conversation it was explained to me that the option to disable auto-renewal 'disappears' after the (email) notification of renewal is sent, a whole 1 month before the policy expires and conveniently, a whole week before prices drop. We all know, thanks to Martin, that the best deals are to be had around 3 weeks out. But auto-renewal also locks in the quoted cost at a time prior to when those most competitive premiums are available. 

I was thus simultaneously stuck with a 'having a laugh' premium but unable to manually disable the auto-renew feature via my web account. I eventually managed to do this (at least I am assured of this) over the phone, but more importantly, I navigated past the scoundrels and got a deal £60 cheaper for my efforts! I will be furious if they auto-renew now.

At this point, it looks to me like they are favouring those who allegedly appreciate the convenience of auto-renewal (are there any?) while making it unfairly difficult for those who don't. I wasn't able to do a 2-second click, rather I had to do a 15 minute phone call listening to a young lady reading from a card. But its the idea that they levering an unfair price advantage by timing their renewal quote before the best prices are available and then lock you out from disabling autorenewal that suggests dirty tactics to me.

DullGreyGuy

trebsy said:
During that telephone conversation it was explained to me that the option to disable auto-renewal 'disappears' after the (email) notification of renewal is sent, a whole 1 month before the policy expires and conveniently, a whole week before prices drop. We all know, thanks to Martin, that the best deals are to be had around 3 weeks out. But auto-renewal also locks in the quoted cost at a time prior to when those most competitive premiums are available. 

I was thus simultaneously stuck with a 'having a laugh' premium but unable to manually disable the auto-renew feature via my web account. I eventually managed to do this (at least I am assured of this) over the phone, but more importantly, I navigated past the scoundrels and got a deal £60 cheaper for my efforts! I will be furious if they auto-renew now.

At this point, it looks to me like they are favouring those who allegedly appreciate the convenience of auto-renewal (are there any?) while making it unfairly difficult for those who don't. I wasn't able to do a 2-second click, rather I had to do a 15 minute phone call listening to a young lady reading from a card. But its the idea that they levering an unfair price advantage by timing their renewal quote before the best prices are available and then lock you out from disabling autorenewal that suggests dirty tactics to me.

The 3 weeks out originates from before the rules on Home and Motor changed around renewals. The text on the page hasn't changed since then so there is no evidence that it's been retested since new customer discounting was banned. Even if it had been things are likely have changed in the couple of following years as people adjust to the new world order. 

Last time I checked this site also promoted shopping around and then speaking to your current vendor, if you follow that advice you're going to be speaking to them anyway and you may as well deal with the auto-renewal at that point when they say they cannot beat your other prices, little point in phoning them twice. 

Haven't worked in consumer insurance for a few years now but last time I did many companies websites are relatively crude behind the scenes and are trying to interface with ancient backend systems of which a surprising number are still running on mainframe systems with over night batch processes etc. To be able to turn auto-renewal off before the renewal has been generated is a very simple operation, it's just a single flag to change from 1 to 0 in most cases. Once the auto renewal process has been triggered there is a whole host of processes that need to be stopped. Could be why multiple insurers allow you to remove autorenewal online early but not mid process. 

As to auto-renewal being a "convenience"... I'd argue it's vastly more about avoiding accidental uninsured situations. There have been several posters on here who've said they opted out of auto-renewal, forgot when their renewal was or life got in the way and then had a significant incident for which they aren't insured for and "what can they do?". In one case the answer was probably "remortgage the house". 

Similarly as a former Motor claims handler, the rate of uninsured accidents notably reduced when auto-renewal became more common. I can put up with making a call, which I'd probably make anyway, if it means the next person that hits my car is more likely to be insured.

trebsy

Many thanks DullGreyGuy for your views. The awful scenario of failing to renew and suffering loss without protection is a very pertinent point. But I was reminded of that potential nightmare via their email.

To their credit, they stated clearly that without any action on my part, I would be charged as per the quote through auto-renewal. And all this was with plenty of time to either go ahead with their offer or go elsewhere. All good as far as I am concerned.

But why do you think they won't let me take the simplest of actions there and then and check whether I'm even set for auto-renewal and select/deselect it if I choose? Do you really believe its due to antiquated systems? The facility to switch it on or off was there prior to the renewal email and the antiquated mainframe allowed for that. Maybe I could have avoided the hassle if they stated in the reminder email whether I was currently set to auto-renew or not? Similarly, why not send the reminder email and then give a week or two for customers to change it?

My case might be unusual, but I found that quotes I got at 4 weeks out were all revised lower after 3 weeks. I actually saved £60 this way and would recommend to others to check it out before defaulting to your current provider.

I'm not sure I properly made my point about the pain of phoning as opposed to clicking - it should be just a quick phone call to switch off auto renewal and to negotiate a fairer premium as you suggested. But here's what happened.

First I had to queue. OK, I can live with that, its a privilege these days to speak to a real person. But then its the confirmation of all my contact details when the call was answered - please don't insult me by saying that's about security because neither at the beginning nor the end of this string of personal questions was security even mentioned. Third was the avoidance of the question - why can't I do this in 2 seconds via my account? I could do it before you sent the email, now I can't, why is that? No answer to that except, 'well I've done it now, anything else I can help you with today.' (I made it clear by the way that this didn't mean I was going to switch off auto-renewal and go elsewhere, merely that I wanted a much less cumbersome way to do it and would be happy to comply if there was a beneficial reason). In summary, it was not an enriching experience and, even more now, I would rather use a remote device than waste time this way.

I'm afraid I still think its a devious way of doing business, maybe its just me? But thanks again for your views.

DullGreyGuy

trebsy said:

But why do you think they won't let me take the simplest of actions there and then and check whether I'm even set for auto-renewal and select/deselect it if I choose? Do you really believe its due to antiquated systems? The facility to switch it on or off was there prior to the renewal email and the antiquated mainframe allowed for that. Maybe I could have avoided the hassle if they stated in the reminder email whether I was currently set to auto-renew or not? Similarly, why not send the reminder email and then give a week or two for customers to change it?

I can only talk about the systems where I have done work around the renewal process, most of those were in-house developed systems ultimately originating from the 80s or 90s despite my time being decades later. 

Prior to auto renewal date it's simple, in each case it was a boolean field, normally in a database but one case not, that has three options null, 0 or 1. To have something on a website that simply changes a 1 to 0 isn't hard. Once the process had started though changing that field to a 0 (or null) wouldn't stop the renewal from happening. The systems had various queues that trigger different activities to happen at different times and to stop the auto renewal from happening you need to remove the policy from all the queues else you'd potentially have various DPA breaches etc. 

To give you another example, our MD wanted to be able to offer 15 months insurance for the price of 12 to intentionally move when your renewal date was. Again in principle you'd think it's easy you just set the renewal date to be +3 months than normal. We did a high level impact assessment with IT who came back with a cost estimate of £20-40m as they had found 12,500 places where the system was hard coded to assume the policy was 12 months long and they gave a 20% confidence factor that they'd found all of them. 

trebsy said:
First I had to queue. OK, I can live with that, its a privilege these days to speak to a real person. But then its the confirmation of all my contact details when the call was answered - please don't insult me by saying that's about security because neither at the beginning nor the end of this string of personal questions was security even mentioned. 

Clearly haven't heard the questions they asked or know how many of them there are. In over a decade of call centre work across multiple industries it was standard practice to ask at least 3 items of personal information to ensure the person on the phone was the account holder. It would more commonly be considered "data protection" than "security" but I would assume that you wouldn't be too happy if someone who doesn't like you can just call up, pretend to be you and cancel your insurance for revenge hoping you'll get pulled over by the police for driving without insurance before you notice. We did have one such case, when the soon to be exwife did that to her wife as an alleged response to being kicked out the home for having an affair with a man. 

trebsy said:
Third was the avoidance of the question - why can't I do this in 2 seconds via my account? I could do it before you sent the email, now I can't, why is that? No answer to that except, 'well I've done it now, anything else I can help you with today.' (I made it clear by the way that this didn't mean I was going to switch off auto-renewal and go elsewhere, merely that I wanted a much less cumbersome way to do it and would be happy to comply if there was a beneficial reason).

My former employer, a large insurance group had 16,000 people in their call centre. Want to guess exactly what percentage of them will have been in the discussions between Marketing, IT, Operations and Commercial about what functionality we did and didnt want to offer? Or see the report from IT in response to the HLIA on the costs for implementing different parts? 

I did actually launch that company's first bit of self service functionality on their website, it didnt include turning auto-renewal on/off, and in that case it was 0.00%. Of the project team of circa 30 people actually only 4 people knew what we were really doing and why we were bothering with Phase 1 that gave nothing but the ability for users to see what policies they held and the last 5 quotes they'd done. 15 of the team were IT and they wouldn't have cared but the other 11 were strongly arguing we should delay the phase to give more functionality but the likes of the brand level Marketing Managers didnt know the real reason of the project.

In another company I discovered a major problem, breaching significant regulations with the potential to cost £10bns, even the directors and auditors had no idea how it happened but one guy who'd been there boy and man remembered exactly what happened in 1993 when he was in the call centre and they were advised to do things differently.  

The agent is unlikely to even know what functionality the website has let alone understand the history nor the background to the decisions. It would have been better had they said that than simply ignore you but the problem with "I dont know" is it tends to lead to "then find out". Firstly that messes up your AHT and so the potential for your bonus and secondly its almost certain that going to the team leader would have the identical answer. Hence side step and move on. 

trebsy

Once again, I am grateful for your perspective and willingness to openly discuss this and to provide a glimpse 'behind the scenes' as it were.

I also have experience with the problems associated with developing obsolete systems and understand the management of variables when overlaying new features over old - at least from an engineering perspective. Control system programs similarly use Boolean, Integer, Long integer and Float as do Python, C++, VBA and countless other languages. But I am still left with the unanswered question I'm afraid. If the young lady could verify that the feature was now deactivated, she implied that she had (remotely) switched the flag off there and then - via a click- during our telephone conversation. If she could, why couldn't I?

I suspect the real reason(s) are to lever a commercial advantage and not primarily to protect me from my own carelessness or poor memory, its not an unfortunate consequence of having to use dated systems, nor the impossibility of a call-handler being able to either understand, or work with, complex and expensive data management systems at the back end, nor is it the logistical problems of communication of time-sensitive objectives with large project teams (the results being poorly implemented).

No, I think it's simply to mop up sales from those people who either forget (or even can't be bothered) to go through the process of opting out and finding a better deal. Without auto-renewal, they would lose those customers. 

I also think it's to obstruct those who have chosen to shop elsewhere. In both cases its obviously advantageous to default it to 'on' and make it awkward to turn it off - exactly what my experience has been.

It's also to force a customer to speak to a call-handler thus providing an opportunity to hang on to their custom via a reduced offer. This also provides opportunity to confirm contact details for future activities under the guise of confirming identity. We will see proof of that when the renewal anniversary comes round next year. Incidentally, the use of a number already recorded on their system to make the call, is of itself at least one element in confirming identity. You do not need four more! GDPR should apply here - sufficient personal data in order to reasonably conduct business activities.

It's to try and obtain an inflated premium through the timing of the offer.

I'm impressed with your diligence in defending an industry to which you clearly have such loyalty DullGreyGuy. I genuinely admire and respect that. However, I'm afraid you haven't convinced me on this occasion, perhaps because of my own stubbornness or prejudices, maybe even ignorance in understanding the mechanisms of an industry you are so familiar with.

Thanks for your willingness and openness to engage in chat about it. With that, I'm giving you the opportunity for the last word.

Best wishes,

Trebsy.