intouch

I had the misfortune recently to have to call my energy provider. After spending what felt like an eternity negotiating their complex web of options, I was then told to expect a long wait as they were "experiencing a high volume of calls".

Eager to avoid the irritating hold music, I swiftly placed the handset firmly back in its place. "Why couldn't they have told me that at the start of the call?", I thought to myself. Mind you, it's not only the time that it takes to get to speak to someone that's annoying; it's also what they do (or don't do, as the case may be) when you finally get through to them that's a source of frustration too.

Rather ironically, it's often the services industry where this type of poor service is most prevalent. However, the feedback we've had from a few solicitor and conveyancing firms about our competitors suggests that the epidemic is spreading to legal indemnity insurance providers too.

In your own time...

It seems the most common complaint is to do with their speed of response, particularly to telephone enquiries. We've been told that some companies consistently fail to provide quotes within a few days, and rather incredibly, sometimes even after a week or two has passed!

I hate bad service like that. It's for this reason that one of our company's founding principles was to provide a great service, and it is a principle that we have rigidly adhered to since day one.

Well equipped

Even before we were a well-established company, we always made sure we were equipped with enough staff to handle the volume of enquiries coming in, without making our customers feel as if they were just one of many in a long queue.

Nowadays, we're exactly the same. With the largest underwriting team in our market, our priority is to provide a quick response to your enquiries. In fact, when contacting us for a quote by telephone, 95% of our customers receive their quote, confirmed in writing, in less than ten minutes.

Naturally, there are cases that require extra consideration before we can provide a quote, such as for complex commercial or development transactions. However, thanks to the collective experience of our specialist underwriters, the majority of these types of enquiries are still usually dealt with within just a few hours.

Striving for improvement

In addition to our large and experienced team of underwriters, we've invested heavily in technology to improve our systems. A case in point is the in-house quotation system which we launched at the tail end of 2013, which enables our underwriters to provide a quote and email confirmation to customers within seconds of them putting down the phone, and sometimes even before the call has ended!

Onwards and upwards

It's no coincidence then, that when we received the responses to our latest customer satisfaction survey, the results were overwhelmingly positive. You can read more about our survey results in the article Happy feet!

So, while the service standards of our competitors, and that of other industries, continue to disappoint, we're constantly striving to improve. However we develop our systems in the future though, one thing's for sure; when you contact us by telephone, you will never have to navigate your way through multiple options, or have to endure irritating hold music.