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Loyal Customers Get Screwed

My motor insurance is up for renewal and my current insurer has just sent me a helpful form I can sign and send in to renew my existing policy.

STOP!!!

It is many years since I realised that just ticking the box is a sure way to guarantee you are paying too much for car  insurance. It always pays to shop around. Even when I want to stay with my existing insurer it is always worth getting a couple of competing quotes. On several occasions I have found that having a cheaper quote from a rival company in my hand will cause the first insurer to re-quote at an even  lower level.

You might think such games are irrelevant in these days of online quotations and automated pricing models but my experience says not. Automated systems will give you a fixed quote but if you can get talking to a human sales rep they always have some leeway to lower their price.

I discussed this situation with a friend of mine who works in sales in a different industry and he made a guilty confession. It is the same in every industry, loyal customers get screwed because they generally pay whatever is asked while while the fickle customer who is hard to sell to and who takes up so much of the salesman's time preparing quotes that are never taken up gets a much better deal.

It makes sense I suppose but it hardly seems fair.




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Comments

Cap'n John said…
Classic example = cable TV.

You get a great deal for the first 3 months, then they jack up the price to the regular price. But as long as you're not locked into a 12 or 24 month contract you just call them when those 3 months are up, threaten to cancel your account, and inevitably they'll give you the intro price for another 3 months.

Sometimes they even throw in some Premium channels for free, but you need to cancel those within a certain time period or they get added to your bill, increasing it higher still.
7:21 pm
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