These past few days, I have had the misfortune of dealing with the contact centres of 3 Life Insurance companies and 1 Bank. Mind you none of these are from the Government so let us not get into that blame game at all.

These insurance companies – I am not naming them. Let me call it Company A. As is common you call and you are greeted by the IVR which always says their menu options have changed so listen in carefully. Damn! What an irritating call tree. You simply make it so boring to interact. All I want is to get across to a human voice straight. Finally I get across and first thing is they talk in Hindi or Marathi even if your language selection is English. If you don’t have English-speaking agents then remove the option from the call tree. I inform her I want to surrender my policy. Immediate question is WHY? Like I care. I want to. My money and I will cancel considering your pathetic returns (less than 1% per annum!). Finally am told that you should download a pdf, fill in and submit it with these documents PERSONALLY to any of their branches. I am now seething. I am not moving my bottom out of my chair. Gave her a piece of my mind. Put me on to her Supervisor / whoever who heard the same rant and finally agreed that I can send it with someone but that someone MUST have an authority letter and his ID proof which had to be issued by the Government of India. Gosh. How difficult they make it!! Thank heavens our man at office has a PAN Card. So finally sent him to submit the form. Day 1 he returns – They accept the form only till 3 pm. Nowhere was that mentioned on the website or orally. Fine I bear it. Next day he goes, the whole building has no electricity so no action. Day 3 he goes and submits it. Thank heavens you would say but lo and behold – you are inundated with missed calls on your mobile from a number and when you call back you simply hear that we tried to contact you but you did not answer so please call the contact centre. Not again. I call and ask them what is the problem only to be told it is from the retention department. I told them clearly they need not bother calling me as my mind is made up but well the calls persist and since they have been on the blocked list, you ignore them. After 10 days or so they realise that this #$%^& is not going to budge so you see credit in your account.

Now coming to Company B – Very similar to Company A’s IVR. Agent greets you in Hindi even if language selected is English. Grin and bear it all. Been there done that. Get across to a human. Same set of question blah blah. Download this form, fill it in and submit it personally to any branch. Same rant goes on. Escalation and finally they agree. So I download the form and fill it. Send it. Man comes back with a completely different form and an authorization form to submit the policy and is told that this should be submitted only at the branch where the policy is issued. I am now livid (Wish I had a multi barrel machine gun). Why a different form? Call up the contact centre and go through that irritating call flow, authentication, Date of birth, home address blah blah. Thank God they did not ask me for the size of my clothes or what I had for breakfast. Asked for an escalation and got to the senior. Ranted, raved and honestly if I were face to face, I would have rained blows. She conferenced me with the Branch Manager of the issuing branch who from the tone of my voice knew that I was definitely one of the draamebaaz customers. Meekly gave in and confirmed to me that she would take care of it all if my man simply submitted the form directly to her. So that was done. Thankfully no retention calls from them. And within a few days we got the credit.

Company C – This was one of the first private insurers in India and I have a 4 digit policy # less than 2000 so am one of the first few customers they have. Call tree nature doesn’t change nor does the language. I am now learning to live with it. So queries sorted and they asked me to update mobile #, e mail ID etc which were old. So I gave them my details even if my Dad is the proposer and I am the life assured. They said I would get a confirmation call so I was like OK. This afternoon I got a call. Gave them all the confirmation details and told him honestly that I was the life assured and proposer was my Dad. So he insisted on talking to my Dad. I was like he is 78 and hard of hearing but no they go by the book. Asked him then to call up my Dad on his mobile but no his rule book said he could not dial any other number. He had the gall to ask me if I could get an authorization letter from my Dad to talk on the phone. I did not know if I should laugh or cry but I surely gave it back to him “Bhaad mein jaao” and hung up. Damn them.

Coming to this Bank – Private sector naturally. These guys go on sending me an SMS every morning stating my balance in the account. I don’t need to know that as I usually don’t leave surplus money in my account (Gujju after all). In March I was told by the accounts people of some service charge levied in my account for this SMS service. I immediately logged into my account and sent a mail out. They responded saying, I will have to go to the nearest branch personally and get it done there. Now I was in no mood honestly to fight so this afternoon post lunch I walked to the bank (Good to walk post lunch is what my sister advised me so I was all set). The person there did not know what to do with my strange request so he consulted his seniors and finally asked me to write an application on plain paper. WOW! This could have been told to me on the mail itself and it would have been done without my walking to them but well private sector bank!!!! Supposedly service oriented.

Such terrible service from all of these people who tout that we are the fastest growing company or whatever hogwash. They don’t even have decent customer service. All they want is ensure the customer is driven away honestly.

My takeaways from all of these? LIC and nationalised banks are far far better. Your expectations are much lower so you have a lesser chance of getting upset and ranting. Think twice before going with these private insurers. Also worth noting that the agents through whom the policies were bought have vanished. So much for that!!!