Notes from a small field

Finally completed one of my least favourite jobs for another year: buying insurance. It doesn’t seem to get any easier, even with the internet and all the price comparison sites. Now there are cash back sites to take in to account as well! Of course it’s only an issue because a competitive renewal quote is apparently too much to ask*. If an insurance company is going to make me haggle with them for a renewal, they’re going to have to do pretty well to overcome my sheer bloody mindedness to go elsewhere on principal. So goodbye Aviva then!

I phoned to encounter the usual menu system, only these days you get to speak the answer. Unsurprisingly the voice recognition didn’t do too well with my request to discuss car and home insurance, and I had to point out it was only a computer a few times before it gave up and put me through. I’d gone with Aviva last year because they had a discount for having both policies with them, but that doesn’t mean they can actually cope with discussing both at the same time. Must be on a whole different web page in the call centre! The first lady I spoke to could only handle home insurance, and give her credit, she did reduce the quote a bit before putting me through to the car insurance line… which was a complete waste of time. He seemed a bit surprised that I wasn’t just phoning up to pay and wouldn’t even contemplate the idea of reducing the price- well done, you just lost car and home insurance business!

The search for a new deal was all fairly standard stuff (web site designers please note, I’d much rather type a date than picking from a list of years as long as your arm!) however I do think companies are losing a lot of business with their unhelpful web sites. I filled in what seemed like an endless stream of almost identical (or in some cases only barely rebranded) forms and at various points just aborted because, basically, computers are dumb. It would be nice to fill in most of the details online but request a call to finalise the process; better than answering a ton of questions on the phone, but with the ability to have any questions answered and do a bit of haggling with a real person.

(* Until recently I’d been lucky enough to renew the same car insurance a few years in a row. That was until I had to make a small claim, whereupon their quote shot up which is just bonkers. Given the number of years I’d been paying insurance without making any claims, you’d thing they’d want to keep me to get some of that money back! Spreadsheet says no though, so someone else is getting the money they could have had.)