A terrible experience, similar to torture.
1. I was buying a new car and on 18/04/2015 I received a good quote for car insurance from Zurich –Connect, which appeared to be an online insurance company, but in fact is a “front-end” online with a large, bureaucratic and busy call centre behind the façade. I paid the premium.
2. I uploaded all the relevant documents, received verification of receipt on my mobile phone 21/04/15 with the message “Abbiamo ricevuto I documenti per attivare la sua polizza. La sua pratica sara gestita dai nostril consulenti entro 8 ore lavorative”.
3. I waited and waited… no policy arrived. I called them several times. Twice the line went dead on me, finally I spoke to someone who spoke very fast Italian who made little concession that I was English and made little effort to help.
4. I asked the car dealership to call on my behalf to find out what was happening. It seems Zurich-Connect could not understand the “attesto di rischio” because I had never made a claim. They now also said that the documents I uploaded 5 days before hadn’t all been received. These were now faxed over 23/04/15.
5. 24/04/15 they said they had not received the faxed items.
6. Now Zurich-Connect said the policy I ordered wasn’t correct and I had to pay more which I sent and they received the next day.
7. And then it all started again… now I had 2 sums of money connected to different policies and more missing documents again. We had phoned more than 20 times. It is impossible to speak to the same person twice, involving lengthy explanations each call and always a lengthy wait for an available agent. At this point I lost faith, fearing that if I took out insurance with Zurich-Connect and had an accident it would be a similar nightmare to make a claim. I cancelled the policy on 25/05/15 by email following the procedures on their website.
8. I received a mobile message 27/04/15 saying that they had received the document.
9. 30/04/15 I phoned to ask where my money was as I’d cancelled the policy, to discover they’d never received the cancellation form attached to the email???… meanwhile the policy had actually arrived!
My heart sank realizing that a reimbursement was going to be so much more difficult to obtain (some €2400). I immediately called again and re sent all the documents by ‘signed for post’ (raccomandata).
10. After more calls to the complaints office in Milan (0259661 for those who need it) I eventually received the first premium back followed finally by the rest on 27/05/15.
11. Zurich-Connect had my money (some €2400) for just under 6 weeks in total. In fairness, the complaints office were reasonably efficient. The company is in desperate need of re-organisation and customer services should be addressed immediately. Text messages sent as receipts are misleading, eg. I received 18 messages, four of them saying my policy was being issued within 8 hours. Last but not least, the arrival of the new car had to be delayed as I had no insurance, we had to go on holiday without it, our money was tied up in red tape and I’m still dreading opening the phone bill!
12. We took a new policy via another on- line insurer- it was immediate, truly on-line and completely painless. This is how on-line insurance works in most of the civilized world
13. Never use Zurich-Connect. They are not an on-line insurance provider- they are a bureaucratic nightmare.
3 June 2015
Unprompted review