My wife’s car insurance is due. I know this because I’ve received a letter from her insurers telling her so, a letter from a well known name as it happens. Not only did the letter tell her that it was due, the company had very kindly gone to the trouble of looking at a range of suppliers and provided a quote for the following twelve months. All good stuff. For only £18.98 a month we could be covered (I’m a nominated driver), fully comprehensively to drive her thirteen year old car.
As with all these letters, I put it to one side to look at once I had the time and when I eventually got round to it the first thing I checked was how much we were paying now. It turned out to be £14.99. Eh? How come? She’s a good driver, neither of us has an accident and the car isn’t worth more than the cost of the excise licence yet the price has gone up nearly 27% in one year, at least ten times the rate of inflation!
After the odd expletive I did what I imagine most people do now, that is I went online and told everyone how crap I felt on Twitter. I then went to a comparison web site put in the details and chose the cheapest quote from a company that I felt I could trust. Ten minutes later I had insurance from the AA at £9.41 a month, a 37% reduction on last year’s price and a 50% reduction on the proposed price.
So in all this is a good news story in that I have ended up saving money. But why do the insurance companies do it? I thought that £14.99 was a fair price last year and I am sure that I would have been prepared to pay a little more to cover inflation but now I feel cheated, ripped off and soured that a company could treat its customers in such a way.
No doubt Bradford and Bingley must employ a small army of agents to take calls from similarly soon-to-be ex-customers disenfranchised by their sharp and dishonest practices. They may even try and sweeten them by shaving some money off to avoid the hassle of moving providers. All of this has to be paid for in the price and so if they had offered me a reasonable deal in the first place they could dispense with all of this cost and create a virtuous circle of loyal and low cost customers.
I’m going to tell this story so many times and their name will be forever synonymous with a feeling of having been let down. A part of rip-off Britain. Is this really worth the extra £4 per month they are not now going to get from me?
To close this story, I had to ring the company to cancel the insurance only to be told that it is the policy holder who has to do so. Another call, another wasted cost and another reason for dissatisfaction. Some service industry!
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 