Shady business tactic or honest mistake ? You decide!
Static | November 12, 2007So here i am, enjoying 2 glorious days off work, sitting on my couch and cursing daytime TV cos there’s nothing good on. After having myself some lunch the post arrives carrying with it my car insurance documents, which are technically arriving 1 week and a half late.
I open the envelope and page through the many pages worth of documentation only to spot an interesting error… my first name is misspelled!
Now my name being misspelled is not exactly a new occurrence, happens quite often actually, but thats not the kind of thing you want to see on an insurance document.
On closer inspection i notice that my details are stamped on multiple sheets of paper and oddly enough its only misspelled once, on one particular document.
To my amusement the only place were my name is misspelled is in the “Certificate of insurance†document (which happens to be on sheet 9 of this particular bundle of papers).
So i take a closer look at the document to make sure no other mistakes have been made and then carry on reading the terms and conditions. I get to a section titled “What is not Covered(exclusions†and decide that this is always nice to be aware off so i read on.
Lo and behold what do i find in clause 7 of this section ?
“The Lead name on your Car insurance Policy must match the lead name on your Certificate of Insurance.â€
So i phoned them up to correct the “mistakeâ€.
Still … i cant help but wonder, was it deliberate or an honest mistake ?
I wont add the name of the company since that could cause complications for this site but lets just say its a fairly well known Insurance broker that operates over the internet.
Oh, I’m sure they don’t do that with every customer. But those complicated names … it’s so tempting!
But uh, how can you misspell “Static” anyway? (j/k)
A company that uses a red tootling telephone got my car description wrong (they said 5 door when it’s only 3), and yet I bet they’d say it was not insured if THEY got the info wrong. Thank heavens something so important is so well safeguarded!
It probably couldn’t happen now due to the linking of insurance and MOT databases for online ordering of Tax discs (a wonderful invention if you can’t be arsed looking for the insurance certificate). Maybe because that loophole is closed, they started spelling names wrong.
Should of heard the phone conversation when i got the mistake fixed
“Hello i need to fix an error on my insurance certificate”
“whats the error?”
“my first name is misspelled”
“Oh thats no problem!”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes thats not a problem”
“Ive read the fineprint and i know for a fact its a problem”
“It is ?”
“Yes, under the exclusions section clause 7 which states that the lead name on this document must match the lead name on record… which essentially means im holding a peice of incredebly expensive toilet paper right now!”
Pause for 5 seconds
“ok sir we’ll send out an updated document right away”
———-
It would have been amusing if the guy handt been insulting my inteligence after having me on hold for 20 minutes.