On day 800 of my elderly parents subsidence and flood claim last week I wrote to the Chairman & Chief Exec of the Ageas Group Board. There was nowhere else left to escalate to. I’ve been dealing with the Head of Claims for over a year. You’d have thought by the time a claim got that far up the tree, it would be under regular scrutiny and in the do the right thing and sort it out pile. But still not it seems, disappointingly.
The Board team have pushed the matter to the UK CEO who has promised to investigate. Good to finally have his attention given I wrote to him twice last year and didn’t get a reply. He did at least ensure the wallpaper order got signed off last week, after the reserve on stock expired twice in some cases, there's due to be a review meeting on Tuesday. Unfortunate that he has not suggested to put in a meeting saying “I would like to hear about your experience.” Listening to your customers gives you great insight. Every story has two sides. I'm writing this to share my perspective as I am the only point of continuity in this long running woeful tale:
Here's my pretty ghastly experience, as a customer, who has had to spend thousands of hours pushing this claim forward, and I still don’t have even an end month in view to promise my parents they can move home again after spending 19 months in rented accommodation at time of writing:
Impressive huh? So much for single point of contact or communication that is “easy as”. Some I have had more involvement with than others.
Some have referred to me / my parents as “idiots” in internal telephone conversations. GDPR information requests do have their uses. Not so great a customer experience. Doesn’t make me feel valued. Still waiting for the formal apology.
Anyone want to call internal audit yet? Where’s the governance? That risk of fire I flagged last year. Our claim should have Critical Risk to Brand Reputation stamped all over it. Internal failures: need to make good prior errors.
Or not it seems from experiences over recent months.
Single Customer View? No one from ageas, seems able to put themselves in my shoes and look at this along the continuum of experience. I’ve been pragmatic all the way through. You can’t change the past. Have to keep looking forward. But you can not deny the past happened.
Back to the customer:
One Property. One Policy. One elderly couple, with various health issues, not able to live in their home since October 2020 when the foot deep hole was dug in the kitchen floor and then the contractor left us, with no action plan.
No help moving. No clarity over what expenses could be claimed or how to do it. Little things that if you take a customer-centric view as a brand you’d have factored into processes and baked in by default. Not ageas.
David Sinclair Ph.D talks about “Healthspan” not just Lifespan. When you are kicking 80, time on both dynamics ticks fast. My parents have lost over 2 years of that through ageas’ recurrent ineptitude. Their health has deteriorated, along with my Mum’s vision, throughout the extended duration of this process. That’s not their fault.
For the Marketers and Comms specialists out there, you’ll all know about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:
Basically, after you’ve covered off water and food, as the ultimate survival basics, next up is shelter: i.e your home. A shelter from the elements, predators, the place you should be able to peaceably sleep. Sleep being critical to your physical and mental wellbeing: Read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
No peaceful sleep for us in over 2 years with continued stress and uncertainty about what was going to happen when to my parents home, was it going to be done to a good standard, what would need to happen in what order. Having to submit 4 formal complaints, so far, escalate to the Ombudsman (a topic for another post in itself), the media & MP’s (3 times so far). Pretty stressful.
Making your customers cry regularly is pretty bad as customer experience goes.
Making them ill, and causing them to take additional medication as a result takes it to a whole new level.
Apparently there’s an “Ageas Care Programme” to support vulnerable customers. Not seen much sign of caring throughout this whole debacle.
A project of scale and complexity beyond ageas capabilities it seems. Yet happy to keep increasing the premium significantly YoY since it occurred for a house my parents can't even live in.
Let’s skip forward from the first 17 months of stress,https://digitaltreasuretrove.blogspot.com/2021/03/ageas-home-insurance-lesson-on-how-not.html to the appointment of claim handler #3 last July. Good news it seemed. They ripped up the scope of contractor #2 saying it was rubbish, which somewhat validated the points my structural engineer had been making.
I was introduced to a team that included a project manager, and a contractor who was (and is) approachable and knowledgeable. Maybe the “easy as” customer service I should have had since the outset would show through.
All seemed promising. I thought I had a team finally wanting to make good the mess they had inherited. Phew. Maybe we were getting somewhere at last, a year after the initial builder no show. I finally had a sensible and robust scope for what was, is and has been an extensive project, taking the house back to brick-work internally in most places and putting it back together. Ceilings, walls, floors, plasterwork, wiring, and that’s before we start on the external works. No small job.
Little process cracks started to show fairly fast. In hindsight I should have seen the red flags when it became clear that Claims Handler #3 had only been briefed on the subsidence / repair side of the job, and not the whole picture. I should have escalated and insisted on a proper SPOC (single point of contact) and RASCI there and then (a project management framework, so everyone in a team is clear what tole they play on each element- Responsible, Accountable, Support, Consulted, Informed).
Cue addition of new points of contact for
- vegetation removal (we had to negotiate with our neighbours to remove a tree and a section of hedge on the boundary). This was a conditional point of moving to repairing the house. No tree removal. No repair work. Pretty critical. We could start demolishing walls and ceilings but not moving to putting the gi-normous jigsaw back together.
- drain work – a sub-contractor was appointed to re-line various drains around the property to keep this high level. To fast forward a little: their work last September was found to be sub-standard. Dug big holes in the drive, filled them back in with the wrong colour materials & left the drive muddy and uneven over the winter, amongst other issues. They came back in March with no warning to us as the property owner. Still didn’t sort all the problems out. I’ve now requested an alternate contractor via the builder that might hopefully deliver better quality work and take a holistic one property one project view. Discussions continue.
- Severn Trent Water – I was told lining one particular pipe was in scope, then the drainage sub-contractor determined it wasn’t because I was told it was a shared pipe owned by Severn Trent. Cue another 6 months me of repeated chasing of STW, and again having to mention the Data Protection Officer before I finally got someone to come out and finalise that it’s not a shared pipe owned by them… back to square one and the drainage scope point from last September. Sigh. I can’t and do not blame ageas for ST inefficiency either, that’s not fair, but it all contributes to the pressure I’ve been under to keep all workstreams moving forward, and now yet again I’m back to having to push ageas to sort it out.
No overall project ownership, co-ordination or accountability across all streams of work. Just me continually have to chase and keep the plates spinning. One Property. One Customer. What should have been one seamless customer experience to getting the job done and my parents home in a timely fashion. #FAIL.
Repair work:
The Contractor’s workmanship has been excellent. The respect and care for the shell of my parents house has been exemplary. The foreman has truly taken ownership. It’s been the most impressively tidy building site given floors being dug up & re-poured, walls and ceilings taken down, electricians channelling into walls, then extensive plasterwork.
So, so, far removed from the 1 star on TrustPilot rating of Contractor #2.
The process around the work – more challenging.
...except they are not… the builder works for the claims handler who works for ageas.
Herein lies the problem.
Before Severn Trent’s sewage disasters threw our world into chaos, my parents, in their late 70s, were more likely to be watching home make-over shows on tv than needing or wanting to undertake a complete makeover of their diligently well-maintained house.
Moving is hard work, renovating is hard work. Even when you are younger, in good health and it’s your choice. When it’s not, it’s twice as hard.
You buy what you believe to be ”premier” insurance to give you peace of mind that you’ll get help and support to sort the problem out if disaster strikes. Not so it turns out with ageas.
A customer-centric company would know and understand the customer journey from claims initiation, through works to completion, tackle the pain points and be there to help their customers navigate unfamiliar processes and guide them through. Not ageas.
My parents and I have a vested interest in understanding the works being done to their house. Nothing unreasonable about that you’d think. They own it. They want to be able to enjoy living in it again. Preferably sooner than later. No negligence of general maintenance by them. The same can not be said of Severn Trent’s infrastructure.
We are not buildings experts. Neither on process nor building regulations and their implications, nor on suppliers of anything house renovation related, especially given the supply challenges created in part by the pandemic . My parents are well beyond being able to cope with projects of this level of complexity. The builder no-show in August 2020 left them in tears. I had no choice to step in to help them. As part of this claim I have now done a crash course on an extensive surveying and construction curriculum. I am beyond grateful to my structural engineer for endless patience explaining technical terms to me, so I could explain things to my parents.
Without me to help them I don’t know what they’d have done. I fear for the exploitation of other elderly or less able ageas customers who don’t have a me to help them. What service and repair quality do they get?
There’s no accountability, no scrutiny. Insurers mark their own homework effectively. The Ombudsman came back a year and a week after I’d put my first complaint to their review, they upheld that the project should be seen as one workstream, that ageas had caused un-necessary delays and suggesting a £1k compensation. That’s not going to make a company the size of ageas blink. It’s less than our premium was put up to last year. It doesn’t even cover my petrol costs over the last 2 and a bit years. Hardly going to encourage a change in behaviour or process improvements. Slow. Toothless.
The Ageas 2021 Annual Report describes their new “Impact24” strategy and specifically references “The PLEDGES WE MADE TOWARDS OUR CUSTOMERS are the following:
§ We help customers protect what they have and to make possible what they aspire.
§ We engage with our customers for the long term.
§ We provide great customer experience.
§ We offer a personalised approach underpinned by clear and open communication”
I’ve not experienced delivery on ANY of those pledges at all. Well maybe the long term piece but I doubt that was written aimed at duration of claim to resolution. #805 days so far.
Re-furbing an 80+ year old house top to bottom is a really, really big and complex job, when you are basically back to a shell, so not entirely constrained by what you inherited, although as far as possible when you have old people with failing sight and memory, who’ve lived in a house almost 40 years and know it with their eyes shut, ideally, you have to put everything back as closely as possible to what it was.
Hundreds of little but important decisions: What makes sense for a future with less and less vision and more and more need for strong light because of the amount of time elapsed? Where do the burglar alarm control box and sensors need to go? What is the laying pattern of the floor tiles? The grout colour? What sort of sound insulation needs to go in between walls that used to be lathe and plaster but now plasterboard (oh and that’s at your own cost cos ridiculously it's not a building regulation requirement in a detached house)? I could go on.
So many decisions let alone the daunting task of spec’ing every wallpaper or paint colour in every room, on every surface, or choosing the appliances, let alone the layout and the drawer handles for the kitchen you didn’t want replacing in the first place, but were told you had no choice. Much to research.
Critically, what needs to happen in what order?
This is where Customer service, not just policy wording should really have kicked in. Help navigating this works phase of the project. It didn’t.
On reflection, discovering that the “start” of works was the day everything left in the house went into storage, 2 days before the designated “pre-start” site meeting, was a sign. Hindsight being a wonderful thing.
The programme of works I got in November was this:
Sequence of works.
1. Wallpaper stripping
2. Crack exposure
3. Approval of repairs
4. Repairs undertaken
5. Repairs sign off
6. Reinstatement works
Finishes schedule to be confirmed prior to the remedial works being undertaken (est 12 weeks from date of meeting [4th Nov 2021])
That's the level of detail plan I got.
So when am I booking a week off work to help my parents move home and re-settle? Roughly even? Still can’t answer that.
Meanwhile, it was MY plea to my parents’ neighbours on compassionate grounds, not the work of the claims handler that finally got the agreement to remove the tree and hedge over the line (albeit with their negotiation coming into play, granted, but that wasn’t in my gift).
Finally, a year after the first conversations about vegetation removal, and with plaster and ceilings coming down daily, we could work towards a position of thinking about repair work without too much additional delay.
DELAY. A word that has come to torment me.
I’ve been reminded throughout the works process by the current claims handler about not causing any delay to the process.
Ironic really when you think it was ageas’ claims handling and process delay that means an August 2020 start didn’t happen, and was instead deferred to November 2021. Yes…15 months later.
I’ve had to move to Leicestershire part time since December to support the process, and support my parents in making the many decisions needed on a project of this scale to ensure we didn’t create delays, and everything was delivered on site when it needed to be.
A site meeting at X o’clock confirmed in writing. An hour prior.. call…"where are you, we need to leave by X o’clock"? Che? That's just time management and a bit of customer respect.
I have a full time job. I’ve made every effort to be as flexible as possible, I am fortunate to largely be able to work remotely, but I can’t always drop everything at short notice. I don’t know how many ageas customers don’t have jobs too. Most I suspect do.
I’ve recently “saved” the project a 7 week delay by making 4 phone calls to source the boiler I was told wasn’t available for weeks. I’m not sure it’s fair to push me about delay, or beat me up about betterment when I’ve been pragmatic and sacrificed original hardwood architraves for modern softwood ones to facilitate the plastering process. I’ve swallowed compromises and gone the extra mile because I see how desperately unsettled and unhappy my parents are nearly every day, and I just want them to be home again. That’s what insurance customer service should deliver as a baseline. Disasters remedied fast.
This is all project management 101. It’s not supposed to be my job as the customer to chase things.
In February with almost all the ceilings in the house down, I was threatened by the Claims Handler with them pulling the builder off site, if I didn’t stop coming to the site (I’d been there 3 days running to specifically look at things for the builder to resolve decisions / to meet the plumber who didn’t even show up in the time window I said I’d be available). “You can not come to site unless it’s an official site meeting or without express permission of the builder. If you do I will pull everyone off site until you’ve gone which will cause delay or I will change the locks, or you can cash out the job and finish it yourself” they said.
Eeek. Really? It’s our house? We are obviously interested in what’s happening to it. We’d agreed weekly photos at the after-the-start-pre-start-meeting. That disappeared into you’ll get photos at the end. I understand the point about importance of Health and Safety, but communication and expectation management matters too. I’ve kept my slightly wobbly / can’t see straight lines v well anymore parents off site as far as possible.
Seeing their home being ripped apart was emotionally very tough for them. Not knowing what the plan was to put it back together has been just as hard.
You feel pretty vulnerable as a customer when you have walls and an odd floor missing, few ceilings in your house and your insurers representative tells you the builder will stop. That’s not great customer experience I can tell you.
So we’ve been nervous, scared, biting our tongue for weeks, met with acute frosty-ness at site visits we’d had to request just so we could see progress.
Progress creates much needed hope for my parents, after such a long time and such hard work that they will eventually get to move home. A customer-centric company would understand that.
A customer centric company would ensure their customers are
proactively invited to site to see their new kitchen and check they were
happy. That didn’t happen. We’ve been peering through the windows or if
we’ve been over to deliver something made sure we have cleared it with
the builder as we’ve been told to, and are in and out ASAP so we don’t
break the “official site visit” rules. Madness. It's an awful feeling.
I understand the need not to get in the way. There are times for sure when we’ve queried things because we didn’t understand the process because no one told us, and we’ve taken the fair and mild ticking off in good spirit. I can see that is annoying from the other side. But this is no way to deliver on your pledge #4 of personalised approach underpinned by clear and open communication
We’ve asked repeatedly for an indication of what’s happening next, broad horizons even, not an hour by hour timetable, so we could make our best guess at what decisions were necessary for us to make in what order, in a timely fashion. Instead I’ve had to anticipate throughout.
“It’s construction, that’s just the way it is” I kept being told. I’m not sure I buy that entirely. I’d have been fired if any of the projects I’ve worked on ever had been run in the way this has.
It’s project management. Dependencies. Relationship building. Integrity. Not rocket science.
Because I’m not allowed in the house unless there’s a site meeting
or I seek specific permission, the next best thing I can do to ensure it
goes back together as we want it is provide detailed documents. I’ve
worked hard to ensure that clear direction is written down, because no-one ever gave me a template or asked me for a clear brief or spec. Surely that's claim management 101? XYZ decisions will need to be made, fill this in and give it back to us by X. Templates make processing information quicker for everyone. The brain doesn't have to work so hard on things its familiar with. Almost every claim must have some requirement for customer input? Ageas are dealing with people's HOMES.
No helpful guidance on the process, things to consider in advance because of regs, (Pledge #1 – what do you aspire to)? We’ve paid for various pieces of non-insured work to try and make the house fit for elderly people to live in (e.g sensibly installing a downstairs shower, given they’d dug the utility room floor up for drain work anyway, so the tiling had all had to come up.). I mapped all the wiring / sockets /lighting etc prior and future to make it easy for the electricians to quote for the extra sockets and presence sensors we wanted for lights, and know exactly where to put everything In absence of guidance on how info on decor was required I’ve created a huge spreadsheet detailing the many wallpaper choices / finish / spec of every surface so it’s reference-able at all times to make things easy in case I am in meeting. Its a big and slightly overwhelming job to make all the decisions and compile for a house being entirely redecorated…
…bar the windows because Ageas have decided in the
last month that the metal bits of the crittal windows don’t count under
the definition of windows, only the wooden frames they sit in it turns out, after I
contested a statement that the doors and windows wouldn’t be re-painted
when the new skirting and architrave is. (Painting the doors was even in
scope).
Who briefs a decorator who is otherwise painting the rest of the room / house to paint the window and says “oh don’t paint the middle bit?” As a layman who'd have thought in agree-ing a scope that you'd have to be specific about metal elements of windows within a wooden frame? It’s bonkers.
In a letter in May 2021 in “interim response” to a formal complaint ageas agreed: “irrespective of whether they have been damaged by flood/subsidence the costs of glosswork, woodwork and wallpaper would be included in the scope of repairs”.
Now, a year later, the Head of Claims is trying to tell me that they didn’t "intend" that definition to include the metal parts of the windows they knew the house to have when they wrote the letter, and, that they are not included under the claim either. For me this is super simple. They’re glossed. They said glosswork would be done. QED.
The house has not had a boiler since November. It hadn’t been lived in for a full year before that. Winter, condensation, no secondary glazing or proper heating, + excess moisture caused by plastering = water on metal window frames = signs of rust. That’s pretty basic chemistry.
Ageas’ stance just doesn’t make sense to me. It feels very petty when you
are redecorating almost every surface in the house to deliberately
exclude the middle of the windows. Where’s the pride in doing a job properly to good standard? Seemingly lost in policy definitions.
The rust on the windows they say is ageing and wear and tear. “In our
surveyor’s opinion the Crittall windows are simply showing signs of
their age, and general wear and tear is not covered by their insurance
policy” they said to my MP. Re-look at that picture above.
They didn’t look like that when my parents moved out. It’s not our fault that the current contractor didn’t see the windows over 2 years ago at the start of the claim. I’m being made to feel like the bad guy for challenging something that's hardly un-reasonable in light of the scale of the job. Goodwill?
Where was the stewardship from ageas to support their vulnerable customer who didn't know last autumn that windows are not windows in scope speak?? AWOL.
In Ageas policy position on wear and tear, the definition of wear and tear is “in the reasonable use of the property and the ordinary operation of natural forces”. There has been no reasonable use of the property given the house has not been safe or fit for my parents to live in for 19 months due to ageas claim handling mis-management and delay, and then subject to extensive building works as a direct result of the claim.
And still they persist in arguing with me.
Stop and think Ageas. Is this all making you feel proud of the business you work for and how you deliver to your customers? Nitpicking at the end of a big job? Insurance is a hedging business. Some you can just take the money from, occasionally you will have to pay out. Unfortunately for both parties that this is one of those such times, and that it's ended up being a big job. But it wasn't us who didn't maintain the drainage infrastructure. It wasn't us that ordered a subsequent heatwave, or even us or our current neighbours that planted a hedge. In 51 years of marriage this is only the second time my parents have made a home insurance claim.
In a recent letter to my MP ageas went on to argue that painting the windows in their entirety would be unfair on other ageas customers because they’ve gone above and beyond cover for us, including re-wiring the house.
If the experience I've had over 2+ years of this claim is going above and beyond, the world truly has gone mad.
What happens for other ageas customers is not my problem, it’s a non point in this discussion. Dad has premier cover. The value of that cover exceeds the cost of the job. For utmost clarity: The re-wire was because their contractor deemed it necessary to meet regulations/ enable certification of works at the end of the project, not at our request, everything was working, and the fuse box just 4 years old. AND we’ve made £ contributions too to that re-wire cost given some reasonable additions and changes requested to accommodate my parents evolving needs having been out their house so long.
We have 2 decorators on site. My Dad or a competent decorator have always painted the windows in one go. No specialists involved as they’ve suggested is required. A steady hand and a fine paint brush. Some metal primer maybe.
We’ve spent more £ in senior management time arguing the point over the last 3 weeks than it would to have just told the builder to get on with it. (My time apparently isn't a consideration in any of this.Where was that vulnerable customer care programme again?) .I don’t understand what’s driving the issue that this has become. It’s fiddly to do, I don’t disagree. The windows will need leaving open to allow paint to dry for sure. But that’s never been a problem before. The house is empty. Risk of theft? Nil. The weather is getting better, paint will dry quicker. Baffles me.
Maybe it’s just about cost? I don’t have and don’t need to have
visibility of how the money works behind this claim.
I hope the UK CEO can just add some exec decision-making and sort it out. I should never have to be arguing to this level of detail to get the job done properly. You'd think Ageas would want to leave happy customers behind them. Much cheaper to have advocates for your brand than have to convince non-customers to buy with expensive advertising.
Ageas messed up. Repeatedly. They’ve recognised that. They seem not to learn though.
"Oh we’ll just apologise again" seems to be the modus
operandi. Not good enough.
Brand reputation clearly isn’t important to ageas. If I was a significant shareholder I’d be worried about the future returns on investments given my experience of how they manage their claims.
Throw in a fait accompli where they TOLD me I was cash settling the exterior works to the terrace and wouldn’t be doing them, even though they were in scope, and without even having a conversation with me after I’d provided landscape architects spec for direction 3 weeks prior, (again, never having been engaged in a conversation about specifying or sourcing materials, and what was or was not possible to amend, and being told I wasn’t to talk to the builder about it), and it’s little wonder that I’m back at escalations to MPs, and the Plc board.
Repeated empty apologies don’t cut it at this point. The
process needs addressing. I’m still waiting for the report minuted in a
meeting on 27th January 2021 as to what the learnings were taken from
the gigantic mess up with Contractor #1.Where is the customer-focus?
I shouldn’t have to be specifying that I need project ownership, accountability and weekly status meetings as we enter the final phases of interior works and start looking to do external works as the weather improves. It should be de facto and from the outset.
A well managed project has regular status meetings/reports.
A well managed client or customer is clear on deliverables and who is going to do what when.
A well managed process has clear accountability and responsibility.
No project governance evident here. Insurance customers are rarely likely to be construction experts. They should be supported by the business to whom they have granted their trust and cash and the product and service they purchased delivered.
ageas may eventually deliver materially on their policy obligations of my parents house insurance. Through effort, determination and seeking external advice from a range of people and skillsets, I’ve largely pushed this process through.
They have not delivered on basic, let alone premier customer service, nor their pledges nor their brand promise of “Easy As”.
Customer experience? Traumatic. And it’s not over yet :-(
I’m exhausted. My parents are broken and have aged considerably. They won’t get time elapsed back or health impacts made better. It’s unforgiveable, and inexcusable because it was entirely avoidable and un-necessary.
In a 20+ year marketing career I have never seen “traumatised” and “exhausted” as a desired nor desirable outcome of a customer buying a product or service.
I truly hope now I have CEO
engagement that changes are made so no-one else has to live through an
experience as awful as ours, and that all the hurdles threatening to
de-rail the final phase of my parents’ project are removed swiftly and
without further argument.
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