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Is anyone there?

What can be simpler than adding a new vehicle to an existing policy? Quite a few things, as it turns out.
Nicola Mawson
By Nicola Mawson, Contributor.
Johannesburg, 10 Oct 2006

Finding a car to buy - to replace SA`s fastest VR6 - took me about an hour. I was lucky, an ad in a Saturday paper, a Sunday morning appointment, and an agreement to buy.

Being the neurotic citizen that I am, the first thing I did after agreeing to buy the car was send an e-mail to the broker to add the car to my policy. And this is when things started to get ugly.

I was - to put it mildly - flabbergasted to discover that the new car would cost substantially more to insure than the stolen one. Even though I had claimed, a 30%-plus hike seemed excessive. And, I had several other questions for the broker, such as why I had a whole month`s premium when I had only possessed the misappropriated car for a week of that month.

A week of increasingly rude e-mails went by, and Friday afternoon arrived with no answers that actually answered any of my questions. Disappointed, I did what most other customers do - shop elsewhere.

The beauty of the Internet is that you can find most of what you want online, including several insurance companies. So, I browsed along to Budget Insurance and Dial Direct. Both have online e-quote facilities.

Ring, ring, ring

Neither worked. After trying about 20 times over the period of a few days, I eventually opted for the old-fashioned route. I picked up the phone, and listened to the sound of "your call is important to us" through several cups of coffee before hanging up.

Put it down to bad training if you wish, but we need to up our local game if we want multinationals to spend gazillions of rand here.

Nicola Mawson, journalist, ITWeb

Back online I went, and filled in an online form. One insurance firm called me back, and then we went through the endless questions about me, my car, my life, my house, my security and pretty much everything else except my DNA.

Finally, I had several quotes in my inbox and could compare them to my current policy at my leisure; only to discover that one of the call-centre people on the other side had not heard a thing I`d said during the course of our 30-minute-plus conversation.

Which raises an interesting point. If SA is to reach that magical growth rate of 6% a year by 2010, halve poverty and halve unemployment, it must find inspiring ways of growing the economy. Government has, as a result, fastened its teeth into the growing BPO [business process outsourcing) sector as one way to boost the country`s economic output.

Good thinking, it`s a booming industry in India and the Philippines after all. Except for one small, but important problem. Dealing with the pool of qualified call centre people locally is frustrating, and often a waste of time.

Put it down to bad training, if you wish, but we need to up our local game if we want multinationals to spend gazillions of rand here.

A tale in point is one I heard over the weekend. My favourite father (hi dad) tells of trying to contact someone at his local Standard Bank branch. All calls to this big-four bank now go through a call centre, which routes the call to the required person at the specified branch.

However, if Sharon, at Eastgate - for argument`s sake - is not available, the call is rerouted so that a message can be taken. Except that the system reroutes the call some 1 200km away to the travel insurance division in Cape Town.

I`m sure that the next time Sharon visits the Mother City, someone will pass on the message.

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