Our previous dealings with the credit card travel insurance company have been exemplary, but by four am this morning when we’d received the fourth email request for some inane detail from the third “case manager” in five days, the grumpy juices began pumping and the keyboard fingers were doing their very best not to provoke some poor overworked person trying to do their job to the best of their ability.
On the one hand all we were asking was for an indication that the actions we had proposed were acceptable.
They on the other hand were reluctant to communicate unless we had made a claim, certified our bone fides, provided sworn witness statements and twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, to be used as evidence.
It was becoming clear that there was a reason that the first automatic response we received had more than half of its contents below a header in bold letters which read “COMPLAINTS PROCESS”.
By that fourth email of the day, clearly a cut and pasted response with no hint of a reply to any of our questions, something snapped, and one of us rattled off and email asking if in fact a human had been involved in the process to date, and if not, could one please actually read any one of our notes and perhaps just indicate that we were on the right track. Realising that by that time it was the weekend in Australia, a longer somewhat more bitterly phrased document was drafted to be sent after the weekend, when by then sure as night follows day, no response will have been received.
Twelve hours later, in the late of the afternoon, frustration levels unabated, the icing on the cake arrived when an unidentified caller began knocking on the inside of the telephone begging to be let out.
Her name was Lara she said by way of friendly introduction, she didn’t offer her surname but it may well have been “Croft”, such was her super-human ability to cut to the chase, to size up our situation, and to check on our well being. She was from the Insurance “medical support” team and was there to help she said, and help she did, questioning us thoroughly to ensure that all was well with the patient, confirming that our strategies for repatriation were sound, allowing us to make our own arrangements but keeping a very experienced, motherly eye on the process we had proposed. Once assured we were able to stand on our own three feet, she wished us well, apologised for the earlier kerfuffle, and assured us that at any time of the night or day help was just a phone call away.
With our faith in that particular company completely restored, we now sit quietly waiting for Wednesday, to see where the next cards fall.
3 comments
A huge upvote for the "Alice's Restaurant" reference!
Respect!!
Well done, Lara. I am currently enduring an endless round of copy-paste customer service myself. I wish Lara's alter ego would come knocking at my phone.
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