How to Effectively Trap Your Customers
Created:There’s an insurance company well-known and widely used in Denmark. This insurance company is also the parent company of a smaller insurance company. You’re a customer at this company.
The smaller company is known for being affordable (especially for students), having a user-friendly app, being transparent about pricing, and clearly showing what injuries and damages are covered. You could cancel this insurance at any time directly from the app. The customer support is friendly and responds quickly. You love this company.
It doesn’t seem practical to have two separate insurance companies, so it was decided to merge both companies.
The parent company has higher pricing, so all customers of the smaller company will be moved to this higher price, which means some of you will pay more than twice of what you did before. As the systems need to be merged, the new coverage plans will be activated July 1st. This merger incurs some costs and technically involves registering with a new insurance company, so you will be charged a bit more in the first month, like a registration fee.
Not all of you were aware of the price increase or the registration fee. Some of you want to cancel this insurance plan. Luckily this can be done from the website, but there’s a catch. It actually can’t be canceled yet, because the insurance has yet to start and you have yet to pay to the registration fee, so technically you’re not even a customer.
You’re unhappy, but since it’s possible to cancel after the first payment, it’s not the end of the world. However, this isn’t very profitable for the insurance company, so you’re also required to pay a cancellation fee, which will be quite expensive for you, since you haven’t had the insurance for a year, which would make it cheaper.
The fee may seem high, especially to students and people on welfare, but to mitigate this, all of you were notified about the increased price. Some customers were lucky to receive this message more than a month before the increase, while some of you received it only a few days before the merge. Maybe you’d still like to avoid the increased price, registration fee, and cancellation fee. You can do so by calling customer support.
Due to the dissatisfaction, the queue for customer support might be very long, with more than 100 or 200 people ahead of you in the queue. The wait time can be impractical for students or working people, who’ll likely call in the afternoon. Some of you may have to wait for two hours, moving from position 180 to 65 in the queue. Due to common cellphone carrier behavior, it is possible that you will be disconnected automatically after two hours. When you call back, your spot in the queue will be reset, ending up at the back of the line. But you won’t be able to reach customer support, before it closes for the day.
Luckily, it is possible to contact customer support on Saturdays. Some of you will try to do this, but for reasons unknown, you’ll remain the first person in the queue for more than 30 minutes, wondering if there’s a problem with the system. Not to worry though, the insurance company has planned for inconveniences like this and made the system tell you to press 1, if you want to be called back. It just so happens that some of you wait for several hours without getting a call. This is worrying, as this is the last day you have to cancel before the insurance activates on Monday. So you call again. The system lets you know that the phone number is already registered and that you’ll be called back soon. You decide to hang up and wait some more. Now it’s getting late, and time is running out, so the you decide to call again, starting out as number 14 in the queue. If you’re lucky, it’ll take about 70 minutes, to get through to a kind service worker, where you can request to have the insurance plan cancelled. The worker, having taken many calls from the transferring customers, cancels immediately without any cancellation fee. This conversation takes less than a minute.
Even though all the negative press was bad for the company, the insurance company, Tryg, would be just fine.