I had a 20 minute round and round conversation with my life insurer this morning. After I hung up I still didn’t really feel satisfied, so much so that I will be writing a letter of complaint. I’ve had life insurance for a few months so my son will be provided for if something happens to me and also work insurance incase I can’t work I don’t want to try and live on a pension as I have done that and don’t want to do it again. Anyway I got it setup so that the money is automatically debited from my bank account. Well that’s fine until it doesn’t happen because of services being down which of course is not the banks fault (note the dripping sarcasm). So after ringing my bank and finding this out I rang up the insurance company and we worked out that as it hadn’t gone through that month, next month (June) I’d be debited twice the amount to make up for the missed month and the next months money. Well this happened, but I also got debited the months amount as per normal so in effect for June I’ve paid double.
Well I rang up the insurance company yet again to explain this and they said that I wasn’t in credit. I said well please explain to me how come I’ve got all this money that’s been debited out of my account on the same day and they couldn’t to my satisfaction. Then they tried to tell me that an invoice is raised three weeks prior to the next debit which is 16 July and that I would have to ring back a couple of days after this to get a refund. EXCUSE ME!!! I was really pissed off at this stage – 15 minutes into the phone conversation and nearly told them to fuck off that I didn’t want to insure with them at all then, but I didn’t. So I said, well it’s more than three weeks until 16 July so how can an invoice have been raised already. After putting me on hold for the third time she came back and said that they would be sending me a cheque for the overpaid amount.
So, the motto of the story is to check your bank statements and persist, persist, persist if you are not satisfied with someone’s ‘Customer Service’. Even writing about it again is getting my heart rate going. God I hope I don’t have to try and make a claim with these guys. Even on their website the link to Complaints wasn’t working. I did, however, manage to find a snail mail address…