Well last week I discovered that if your car happens to have 4 dents, ICICI Lombard, the largest private insurance company in the country refuses to insure it. Here is the story.
I happen to own an 8 years old Maruti Wagon R car, which needed to be insured. For the past many years the car has been insured with ICICI Lombard. Usually I buy the insurance online, one can pay through a card and print the cover note instantaneously. The system works well and I have never had any problem. The car is presently being used by my parents who live in Lucknow and the mileage even after 8 years of use is just about 60000 kms. The car is in good condition, has never met with any serious accident and I have never had any occasion to claim insurance in these many years that I have owned the car.
I knew that the car insurance needs to be renewed sometime in May. However, this time I forgot the exact date and when I checked on May 23rd I discovered that the insurance had expired on May 20th. As always I logged on to ICICI Lombard’s website and renewed the insurance cover. I printed the cover note and this time I was informed that the insurance company would like to inspect the vehicle as well.
On May 25th I was in Mumbai when I received a call from Mr. Mohd. Israel, who claimed he was calling from ICICL Lombard and wished to inspect my car. I gave him my parent’s address, and the contact number asking him to fix a mutually agreeable time for an inspection. The next day, while I was busy in a meeting I again received a call, this time from someone else again claiming to be calling from ICICI Lombard and asking the same details that I had given to Mr. Israel the day before. Apparently, Mr. Israel had passed on my ‘lead’ to this gentleman but had not given him the contact details. Busy as I was, I told the caller to get details from Mr. Israel and not bother me.
My father called up later in the day and told me that someone from the insurance company had come to inspect the car had taken a few snaps and completed the formalities. I was thus reassured that all was well.
Imagine my shock the next day when I received a sms from ICICI Lombard informing that my insurance cover has been cancelled as my car was in a ‘unsatisfactory condition’. I was completely taken aback as the car to the best of my knowledge is in good condition, and as I said before has never been in any accident and we have never ever put in an insurance claim. It is a regular car, which has been in use for 8 years and surely carries the usual dents and scratches that any car in India, which has been in use for so many years does.
I set about getting more details and if possible rectify the problem.
I called up the customer care number on the ICICI website and spoke with one of their executives. While I explained to him the problem and requested information on why my insurance cover has been cancelled, he pleaded helplessness and directed me to one Ms. Preeti Pujari in their Mumbai office. I spoke with Ms. Pujari, who explained to me that as per the surveyor’s report my car had 4 dents and hence ICICI Lombard would not be able to insure it. I explained to her that I had exchanged heated words over the phone when the surveyor had called me and I suspected he was getting even with me. When I requested that she give me the contact number of someone in customer care, she rudely told me that she was from the ‘survey’ department and it was not her job to give me any numbers.
Undeterred I went back to ICICI Lombard website and found out that they list 3 customer care officers ( in some hierarchy) one could get in touch with if one had a problem. This includes the national head of operations Mr. Eswaranatarajan. All it seems one needed to do was click on a button and write a mail. I tried this option but alas, I landed on a webpage, which had a form, which needed to be filled and the very first field (a mandatory field) was a number that one was required to key in. Now I hunted the website to find this number but couldn’t. There were of course, no phone numbers there and thus it was not possible to speak with any of these officers.
Aghast I narrated my travails with ICICI Lombard to a colleague at work. He apparently happened to know someone in the ICICI Lombard brand team, whom he got in touch with and I narrated my tale of woes to him. This gentleman asked me to write to him narrating the entire story. He promised to pass it on someone in ICICI Lombard’s customer care team.In the meanwhile I called up my father and asked him to buy the insurance from one of our public sector general insurance companies.
I sent out an email to this colleague’s friend with in an hour of our telephonic discussion, two days back. I am yet to hear from anyone in ICICI Lombard. Nor have I heard anything about the refund of my money, which they charged on my card.
And guess what, the much maligned PSU insurer (National Insurance) sent someone over for inspecting the car within a couple of hours of my father putting in a request, this gentleman checked the car, took some snaps, found it perfectly alright and issued a policy immediately.
I was left wondering that don’t we quite often treat our PSU’s a tad unfairly. They may not be as tech savvy and glamorous with fancy offices and slick MBA types on their staff, but they do deliver.
As far as ICICI Lombard is concerned I am still waiting to hear from them.
