The value of information

[tzijlstra]

This is a long story, apologies, there is a point to it though. TL;DR Companies we deal with every day have terrible information management systems in place.

 

End of May my Honda got stolen, it was recovered by the police and then the 'waiting for Churchill' game began. I rang the claims team on a regular basis only to be told contradicting stories time and time again.

 

After threatening with an official complaint things all of a sudden spun into (slow motion) action. All well, in the end they decided the car was a total loss and they are in the process of transferring me the money it was worth minus my excess. 3,5 months of annoyance, frustration and lots of time (which I fortunately have) wasted, but at least a result.

 

Now the kicker - Churchill sent me a letter last week happily informing me that I would automatically renew on the 6th of September. I immediately got on the phone, got assured it wouldn't go through. Guess what - it went through, 500£+ taken out of my account. Ridiculous, straight on the phone this morning, again threatened an official complaint, straight through to 'cancellations' who promised to return the money on the spot.

 

So aside from it making me feel enraged, what was actually going on here?

 

Poor information management.

 

I am an information manager, I have a PhD and an MSc in the subject, I know what I am talking about, over the past months I have kept track of all the errors and so on and can only conclude the following:

 

Churchill (Directline group) has at least 3 different files on me (or you, as their customer); a personal information file, a policy file, a car-details file. then there is a 'loss-adjuster' who decided what should happen, he has a separate file, cobbled together from the other 3 files, the actual car (he went to see it) and the police report. I suspect they also have a 'marketing' file but we'll leave that out of the loop.

 

Each time I contact the Claims team they add information to my personal information file. The police report is attached to the car-details file and the policy file includes the payment side of things. The claims team don't really use the policy file although they have access.

 

All these files are digital and accessed via a corporate information system, I suspect they are still working with a very old COBOL or even DOS based system as they used to be part of RBS and they did up until a few years ago. This means that each 'screen' has a very limited capacity to enter data. This is where abbreviations come in and also duplications. My personal file, based on the number of calls I have had must run into the dozens of screens. The result of this is that each time I call them the agent does not have full overview of my personal file, let alone the other files.

 

This leads to confusion and duplication, I asked them to read out one of my messages from a few weeks ago: The renewal needs to be cancelled now.

 

It reappeared in 2 different screens in my personal file, but they were both only found after 3 minutes of the agent stumbling through the screens. Of course, putting it in the file does not mean anything, because these agents aren't the people dealing with renewals, that is a different team and if that message is stuck in my personal file, not the policy file, then nobody will read it.

 

I also know that there is a car-file, this is due to a similar incident where I got contacted by two (presumably freelance) loss-adjusters, both with slight variations on the file - one assessed that the car was pretty much scot free, the other actually had a file stating the interior was severely damaged. It is the former one that Churchill held until I told them to get in touch with the latter loss-adjuster (I am not kidding, they didn't even know who was doing it, que one month of the car just sitting in storage) and surprise surprise, the former report was rubbish, the car was indeed severely damaged in the interior.

 

Churchill could have saved, in my estimation, 2 months on the process, which cost them 14£ a day in storage fees: 840£, around 6 hours of phone calls with me: 60£, a call-out fee on one loss-adjuster: 150£. That is 1000£ they wasted by having a terrible information system in place, that is 1000£ they will have to recover through charging more to customers.

 

They are one of the bigger insurers in this country, I assume they have at least ten stolen cars a day to deal with. If they, on average, lose 500£ on each case that is 5000£ a day, that is nearly 2 million pounds a year. A new information system for 300 operatives that actually works well and on modern equipment, and results in happy customers, will cost them around 1 million for implementation and perhaps 1 million for training their staff and managing the change process.

 

It would seriously baffle me, were it not that in my professional capacity I know that this isn't the only company to operate this poorly. Fortunately I also know that Allianz has a state of the art system and that they pay out within days of a claim being processed. Guess who my next insurer is?

[unbeliever]

More the value of good organisation, but I agree that administrative atrophy is commonplace despite the wide variety of technical solutions available to prevent it.

[alchresearch]

Churchill are a terrible insurance company full stop.

 

They dragged their heels on a claim when one of their customers ran into me. Yet when I employed a solicitor to do the chasing (at their expense) it was quickly settled.

[tzijlstra]

Churchill are a terrible insurance company full stop.

 

They dragged their heels on a claim when one of their customers ran into me. Yet when I employed a solicitor to do the chasing (at their expense) it was quickly settled.

 

Yes, that is my experience as well, not that I needed a solicitor, I just read up on the formal complaints procedure and used it to reasonable effect. It is blood-boiling though, I can not get my head around the incompetence that has been affecting my case.

 

---------- Post added 08-09-2016 at 15:22 ----------

 

More the value of good organisation, but I agree that administrative atrophy is commonplace despite the wide variety of technical solutions available to prevent it.

 

Every good manager should have a course in information management and information literacy, it is one of the many short-comings in management training as is. Add to that the fact that most companies don't even know they have problems with their information management, problems that can be solved pretty easily by knowledgeable people and you get the sort of mishaps as I've been through.

[NigelFargate]

Churchill are a terrible insurance company full stop.

 

They dragged their heels on a claim when one of their customers ran into me. Yet when I employed a solicitor to do the chasing (at their expense) it was quickly settled.

 

Agreed. I once had both my car and home insurance with Churchill. I had major problems in getting them to pay out on what I thought were simple claims. I would not touch them again with a barge pole. Even after several years have passed, I wince whenever I see or hear that bloody dog.

Edited September 8, 2016 by NigelFargate

[*_ash_*]

Information is my favourite subject , Insurance companies are my most hated, sp not write another essay in here about it . However,

 

1. insurance companies, I spit on them

 

2. in this case, I think I can sum it up as it reminds me of just about everything we deal with today, and I saw it happening years ago in places I worked at!

 

Centralised call-centres (and outsourcing).

 

That's where things started going wrong. In my experience, the hourly rate doesn't make a great deal of difference in that term 'more you pay better you get'. The problem lies with the fact that large call-centres are places where people just take call after call, and don't care one single bit about personally helping you. (that's when you finally get to speak to someone, which is a task in itself in recent times)

 

I saw this first hand. I worked in a change over once and from working with a small group of people, covering a county*, and worked on every call to fix things - (though call times were loosely monitored), to the new place helping with the changeover in a huge countrywide call centre, where when people didn't know I worked at the previous ones encouraged me to get rid of complex calls - tell them the computers are down or something because call times were strictly monitored.

 

In other words, stuff the customer, put them through to someone else, you're unlikely to speak to them again.

 

It wouldn't surprise if that large call centre has gone now, I'm talking 20 years ago and in today's time most of those CC staff have probably gone, and replaced with Indian call centres and/or Press 1 press 3 press 6 etc.

 

 

 

*I acknowledge though that this was expensive, and companies don't want expense, one way they've got around this these days is agency staff - if you eventually speak to someone in charge they can just say it was rubbish staff and sack them, get a new one in! (that's somehow customer satisfaction