I’ve been playing phone tag with my car insurance company to see if they could match my house insurance with another company. On the phone, it sounded like this would not be possible but when I received a package in the mail outlining the details of their package, it turns out that they made a mistake and it reduced the price I pay for current house insurance by $100 a year. Bonus!
Thinking this would be the best route to follow, I decided to phone up my current home insurance company to see if they could ‘give me a better price’ on my home insurance. I never mentioned that I had sought out other quotes, I just wanted to see what they would do.
Faithful readers of this collection of my thoughts are by far more wise than I therefore I can only assume that you already know what I’m going to say. Turns out that the representative on the other end of the line said she would look for any ‘discounts’ that she could apply and sure enough she found one. Turns out that I have (surprisingly) have a good credit rating so this equates to a 14% reduction in my annual insurance amount. So now I basically saved myself $100 a year on home insurance and it comes out to $1 less a month than my car insurance company. They said they would apply this immediately which means I get a $2 deposit in my bank account for this month’s insurance and next month the new amount coming out starts.
Let’s think of a few things..
- My new annual payout is $50 less than what I paid last year. Could I have received this ‘discount’ last year?
- They sent me a renewal notice which had the exorbitant amount on it. But after a simple phone call, they lower it by $100 a year.
And here’s where my thoughts on customer service come into play. Instead of feeling great about being with this company, I feel shafted. I feel that their automated systems should be able to see if there are any ‘discounts’ they can apply every month. Imagine the feeling you would have if you received notice that they just automatically discovered that your credit rating is amazing so they will be reducing the amount you need to pay. Congrats! It’s like winning the lottery!
But no, what am I thinking? I guess insurance companies don’t really have us to think about, right? It’s all about them and if they can keep goughing me for monthly payments that are higher than what they really need, heck, why not?
Good samiritans abound.
Case in point, I guess I know that it’s up to me to investigate these things and this is my public service message for the day: Call your insurance companies and ask them the simple question “Is there any way we can lower the amount I pay?”. That’s all I did and I have now lowered the amount by $100. I have this feeling that I should leave them anyhow for not following strict Wal-Mart customer ideals, but something tells me the next insurance company is no better.
iplaying: If The World – Guns N’ Roses (Chinese Democracy – YES, it’s finally out after fifteen years and it isn’t bad at all.)