Some companies fail customers by design: an open letter to Generali.

Yes, it’s not always an accident, some companies actually plan to fail you.

As a User Experience Consultant, I help businesses avoid designing the wrong things, improve their business, and increase customer loyalty, so it’s pretty shocking when I come across businesses designed to fail their customers.

My husband and I are working hard to get the Italian insurance giant Generali to treat us like humans.

This open letter won’t tell you all the awful details of our communications, but hopefully, it will accomplish 3 things:

1. Warn other customers about using Generali

2. Bring customer voices up to the top of the agenda for these insurance companies

3. Let these indifferent giants know that their terrible services can cost them more than they save

Two years ago, my husband and I moved to Spain to start our dream life. We had a vision of travelling around this amazing country in a campervan.

After months of waiting for the van to be converted into our house on wheels, we finally had it parked two roads up from our apartment. This was back in October, and we had moved out of town to enjoy the safety of a quiet village.

But then our plan fell apart.

Three months later on 4 January, I walked out of our apartment at 8 am for my midwife appointment (I was 8 months pregnant at that time).

I looked around and Fiona (our van) was gone. Seeing the empty space where the van had stood felt chilling and surreal. I was in total shock for weeks.

Here started the most stressful and disrespectful customer service relationship we have ever endured. This is thanks to Generalli’s car insurance operation in Spain.

We trusted this insurance service to do the one job they were contracted to do: help us when things went wrong.

[We are gathering all communications we have had with them since January so I can make it public, this way you will be able to see for yourselves how some companies fail by design]

After 3 months of trying to get the value of the van back, we can give you a few insights:

At Generali’s customer service departments:

• No one is responsible for your process, and each day you call again to explain yourself anew
• One day you get one piece of information and another day they say the opposite — with no consequences
• They say they’ll call back or email, but never do
• They don’t even sign off their emails, so you never know who you’re talking to
• They interpret the wording of contracts to pay unfair amounts far below what was explicitly agreed
• You have to call up hundreds of times, just to realise eventually that you are being willfully misled by a dishonest operation

But this story has a twist!

One day we got a call from the local police station. The van had appeared in Germany! Someone has been living in it and travelling Europe.

This should have been great news for Generali, they saved a payout for the van, but this second act revealed even more failures in the customer service.

Now we had to deal with 3 departments and voilá…none of them talked to each other. They preferred to make us the intermediaries. For the following month, we were calling between Generali departments trying to get some clarity of agreement, only to be left waiting once again. We also had to call the police in Germany, as the insurance company was ignoring them too.

It felt like a game of ping pong, and we were the ball.

I will summarise for you the subsequent festival of terrible customer service and terrible values demonstrated by Generali:

1. At no moment did anyone ever say: that’s great news the van appeared! (This might sound like a nice ‘extra’ but a tiny dose of humanity can go a long way.)
2. The damaged department just said ‘We are no longer responsible for your case. Contact the recovery service’ (no sign-off)
3. The recovery service then said it wasn’t their responsibility. (When they finally admitted it was in fact their problem, they proceeded to ignore all communication from us and the police for well over a month.)
4. After we had called maybe 15 times, the recovery department said it actually wasn’t their responsibility after all. It was us who had to travel to Germany and find our way back over 2000km with a van that had been damaged by thieves and wasn’t even starting.

You get the pattern by now.

Their indifference, inefficiency and dishonesty are staggering.

Today we contacted them again… and we had a very nice lady suggest we have a friend pick up the van, or “pop” up to Germany ourselves.

Somehow, I don’t think any of my friends will be interested in doing the work Generali had already agreed to do.

So now we have a broken van in Germany, full-time work and a 3-month-old baby.

There is no conclusion yet, but I will make sure I will come back here to share more details. Don’t worry though, they said they would be in touch “shortly”.

One free piece of advice for Generali: your competitors are contracting Customer Experience Designers to improve their services, and eventually this way of doing business will be a thing of the past, as will Generali.

And do you know why you can’t treat people like this without consequences?

Because the market responds.

Because customers get angry.

Because people make noise and vote with their feet.

You won’t believe how much impact one outraged customer can have in the information age.

If you have any doubts, read about ‘United Breaks Guitars’, by Dave Carrol and see how much a single dissatisfied customer can affect the profitability of your business.

Unlike Generali, I will sign off my letter:

Yours sincerely,

Sofia Western