I wrote a while ago about my wife's car accident, and how rotten our insurance coverage turned out to be.
Well, it has just gotten worse, pretty much every step of the way, and I'm torn between my frustration as an abused customer, and my fascination as a professional marketer.
From a marketing perspective, it seems that most all of the auto and home insurance companies made the strategic decision years ago to forsake communicating any meaningful value.
Let's face it: insurance only matters if your house burns down or you wreck your car, so forget about trying to brand those lifestyle moments. Accidents are complicated, bad news, and a good portion of humanity does't even grasp the possibility that things like that might even happen to them.
And, since insurance is usually mandated by mortgage bankers and state auto regulators, the providers are provided with a ready market of motivated customers, only they're customers with no conception of tomorrow.
So the insurers have made the decision to brand solely on the basis of price. Low monthly payments.
And they couldn't have been more effective had they chosen to operate as a sinister cartel. Insurance in the US and UK is sold based cost, which has been utterly disconnected from any subsequent event or value.
In order to aggressively pursue this commodity-based pricing model, however, the providers have scrimped at the otherwise unnoticed back end of the product delivery equation: customer satisfaction. Since it's an odds game, perhaps they've done the math, and figured out that a small percentage of people will actually need insurance payments, so it's OK to forget about them. At least that's what has happened in our case.
So now for the disgruntled consumer side of my split-personality:
From the day of our accident, when we discovered our independent agent at Koenig & Strey had already left the office early for a long holiday weekend, we have been treated as de facto enemies of the state.
- We had to beg for advice on how to handle follow-up doctor visits, and got conflicting directions
- The assessor of the totaled wreck quoted a price far below what a dealer would charge, and then obnoxiously referenced a company pricing policy without explaining why it was honest or fair
- Few of the medical expenses have yet to be paid, so we've received letters from collection agencies seeking payment for ambulance and emergency room charges
- What little communication we've gotten on the medical front has been to inform us that our insurer -- we thought it was MetLife, but correspondence also comes from United Healthcare -- won't cover a fourth of the charges anyway
All in all, it would be frightening to see how we'd be treated if our insurance company hadn't collected our premiums all these years.
We have not been satisfied, even slightly, by any experience related to our claim; certainly, our insurance company is not on our side, and it has no expectation of keeping us as loyal customers.
So this is where the dual sides of my experience, er, crash head-on: Koenig/MetLife (and/or whatever companies to which they've syndicated or outsourced responsibility for our coverage) are set up to treat us this way.
It can't be a mistake...the efforts are too consistently unfriendly and unhelpful, the processes too convoluted to accomplish anything beyond reducing the service, and limiting the amount of financial support we receive.
How does a company or an industry...any industry...keep its prices, earn its profits, or even stay in business, when it reduces the value of its product or benefits to zero, yet still charges for them?
It sure seems like an accident waiting to happen.
(PS: Where's the TripAdvisor community site for rating how insurance companies handle claims? Anybody want to start a new business, or does it already exist?)
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