My business’ monthly insurance payment was accidentally duplicated several months ago, and it took months of wrestling with the insurance company to get the money. I spotted the duplication the day after it happened while checking our accounting records. I called up the insurer, explained the issue to them, then requested for our money to be refunded. They told me that I’d need to call back in a couple of days, because they couldn’t validate the claim until after the duplicated payment had cleared.
I called up the insurer two days later, as instructed, and they confirmed the duplication over the phone, verified I was calling from the business I said I was calling from, then issued and mailed a cheque to my office for the duplicated amount.
Problem solved, I thought.
A month after the call, no cheques had arrived. I called the insurer to ask where the money was – they cancelled the first cheque, given it hadn’t arrived, checked the address and issued a second cheque.
This happened all over again another month later. When they proposed issuing a third cheque, I asked them if they could refund my money by EFT instead. They said no. It wasn’t an option because the payment was made by BPAY, which meant they couldn’t validate any bank account I nominated for the EFT (even though I’d already answered a series of security questions to confirm I was from the company I said I was from!).
A fortnight passed, and the third cheque still hadn’t turned up, so I rang the insurer yet again.
Angry, I complained about their processes, but they simply reiterated that they could not do an EFT refund for security reasons (again, despite my clearing all their other security criteria). I asked if there were any alternative methods for the refund and got a blunt “no.” To make this call worse than the others, they weren’t even willing to cancel this cheque! They said postal services were known for taking up to three weeks to deliver their mail, and it’d only been two weeks since cheque #3 was sent, so they weren’t willing to cancel it yet.
I asked them how many cheques they’d send out and then cancel before they realised it wasn’t working and decided to try something different. They said the best they could do was call me back after the three week mark to see if the cheque had arrived.
They never called, but the cheque (the third one) arrived the following day – almost three months after first speaking to the insurer about the problem. If I adhered to such useless bureaucratic processes like this with my clients I’d quickly go out of business!
