Mail-out madness as insurer offers refunds to customers in error UK insurer Hastings Direct had a few technical issues this week after some of its customers were told they'd receive refunds, only to have their hopes dashed by a hasty apology. That particular email was among a variety of messages sent to customers in error. On the face of things, it appears as though somebody has run a …
It usually means a data pipeline that used to mean applying taxonomies to data from multiple sources to produce final production entities that have richer data than the original source data. Because its a pipeline, you can re-run and re-create your prod data from the sources any time you like. An example might be OCRing images to produce metadata that the image/related objects can be tagged with.
In the past that meant complex systems that carefully categorized data and applied rules to create the taxonomy, but today for sure there is AI data enrichment going on.
Hastings car insurance a few years back. Their website was dreadful. It wouldn't let me paste in my password insisting it was typed in instead. As I always pick very long, complex passwords this made logging in quite irritating. Then their site was difficult to navigate and if you found yourself on the wrong page and clicked the browser back button it automatically logged you out and you had to start from scratch again. I didn't renew with them the following year.
I had car insurance with Hastings a few years back too. Needed to make a claim, and the whole experience was deeply unpleasant, and included them passing my details to a car hire company who were operating a "you've damaged our car scam". I wouldn't touch Hastings with a bargepole dipped in dog mess, and regardless of their cheap quotes I'd advise others to steer well clear. I'm wholly unsurprised they've managed to mess up their administration.
I received that email, although I had declined to renew as they were more expensive than an equivalent provider.
So in my mind it went something like ... I did move my car insurance didn't I..
A quick search of my emails said yes, yes I did, but just to make sure I logged on to said insurance provider to make sure.
Where to my horror it only showed an insurance policy from a few years ago... cue arse twitching panic!
I called the number and after wading through numerous options to try and find a relevant person ( No I wasn't thinking of leaving, No I haven't had an accident and so on) I managed to get through to a helpful chap who confirmed I did have a policy and he sent me a password reset which seemed to reset the account and I could then see my current policy.
Beer because I needed one after thinking I may have been driving round without insurance (after I returned home not while driving of course!)
the company's take on telematics – YouDrive
Ah, yes, a black box, fitted to monitor your driving and (hopefully) get you lower premiums. The same black boxes which interpret any sudden control input as you trying to avoid an accident because you weren't paying attention or were driving badly. Nothing to do with someone pulling out in front of you / the traffic lights changing to red / someone fixated on their mobile stepping out into the road without looking / a dog running out into the road, all of them causing you to brake sharply and/or possibly swerve to avoid a collision. Or even dictating what time you are allowed to drive your own vehicle and reporting you for driving after 10pm (yes, that is a thing.)
Recording telematics without anything to provide context, such as a camera, is stupid and pointless.
I opened one of those black boxes up. It does look like it might have GPS, and bluetooth to talk to the customer's phone. Annoyingly needs some key to use, so I couldn't re-purpose it for my own vehicle tracking interests.
I reckon they're 99% placebo: the fact that it's there with a flashing red light and connection to your phone makes you drive more carefully.
"Recording telematics without anything to provide context, such as a camera, is stupid and pointless."
Let me just correct you on a point here. It's Stupid & Pointless for the Customer. However, it is Perfect Data for the Insurance Company to allow them to up your rates, whenever they feel like it. Trust me, it's working perfectly as designed...
(And just to make that doubly clear - it wasnt designed for the Customer...)
I always assumed that the main customer for these was parents wanting to keep an eye on their teenaged kids (and spend slightly less on insurance).
I don't think they could offer me a big enough discount to use it, even my mum doesn't stick to 70mph on the motorway, and I'd get dinged all the time.
Also you've made a classic "error made whilst writing an error message" error. In this case it looks like a missing "AND renewal_date is not null" clause in a SQL statement.
Of course they go on about how futuristic and whizzy their new machine learning tech is, and then reveal that they can't even write simple SQL statements.
I got the email and my renewal date is not null. I expect it's some very similar error though.
My own theory is that they sent it to anyone they could have given a lower quote to, but didn't because the shareholders want new yachts.
and then reveal that they can't even write simple SQL statements.
With this kind of thing it's probably recursive, in that they got ChatGPT to write their SQL statements for them.
It's AI all the way down (in a flaming death spiral)...
I'm curiously interested in what counts as a "Major Incident"? Documents sent to the wrong people? Insurance given to Ne'er-do-wells? CEO dropped his ice cream on the keyboard.
Based on my (admittedly) low opinion of insurance companies, I wouldnt be surprised if a Major Incident is when they had to pay out to a customer - "Think of the Shareholders!". Paying out 90% less would sound extremely desirable to most CEO's... Definitely something for them to crow about... Although perhaps not to the regular media, only the financial times...
Yet again;
Mass messages need to go to a minimum of one human unrelated to the backend for approval.
Who should then select a handful of customers at random and investigate any anomaly (e.g. being offered car insurance refunds when you don't have car insurance).
This should be standard practice for any email which could end up in more than a dozen customer's inboxes.
I remember once receiving a letter from a LAWYER. It was the only car insurance claim I'd ever made and they represented the other guy's insurance and they were frustrated at the delay in processing the claim (i.e. nothing whatsoever to do with me, take it up with my insurer). It was all very threatening and obviously designed to have me on the phone to my insurer in a panic to have them resolve the situation. It threatened to take action directly against me, file for the full cost of the claim to myself personally, etc. I told them where to go. Not least because I had agreed no such figure... and if you did expect payment from me I'd do my own investigation and claim process at great length and I'd want to see the £18,000 (including £9000 for a replacement courtesy car for a couple of days) justified.
Anyway... the letter they wrote was intended to tell me that they were pursing me personally for that £18,000 and that I had to pay it immediately and that if I did pay £18,000 they'd consider it full settlement of the claim. Except... that's not what they wrote. The letter was obviously mail-merged and the box for the amount and expected payment was significantly less. £0.00p.
In my rebuttal (where I basically told them to take it up with my insurer's or I'd dig into why it's £18,000 for a small dent and a taxi), I offered, as a gesture of goodwill, to write them a cheque for this full stated amount in their letter in complete settlement, as written.
They didn't take me up on the offer. They just went away and my insurer settled things in their own time.
And my next insurance renewal was actually cheaper (which I still can't fathom).
The lesson: If you're going to just mail-merge stuff to hundreds of people with a standard form letter... have someone real and human check the output before you pop it in the post.
I once got letters similar to that, where the other person's insurance company couldn't get a response from mine (elephant.co.uk, I think/hope they're defunct now). I did actually ring up my insurance company to make sure they were dealing with it.
Despite their assurances, they were not dealing with it, and I ended up getting taken to small claims court (which of course I didn't turn up to, because my insurer had told me they were on it).
Cue an even more irate call to my insurer, and they actually did their job and got it all sorted, no cost to me. Obviously I changed insurer, and a few months later I got a call from someone at Elephant wondering if there was a reason I'd stopped using them...
I got the same email - I'm not a Hastings customer, never have been. I have used Confused.com to check prices about a month back, but I bought through MoneySupermarket. So I wonder how giving Confused.com my email address lead to Hastings sending me a refund notice for a product I don't own (nor ever have).
I had a similar issue with Hastings about 10 years ago. They refunded the full amount I paid for my insurance out of the blue. Only thing is, they didn't tell me, so I never noticed the amount going back on my credit card. About 6 months later they started chasing me with letters and debt collectors for an outstanding amount. Each time I wrote to them, showing my (original) credit card statement showing the payment had been taken, and they went away for about 8 weeks, then started chasing me again. This went on for about a year, with me on the phone to them, and them on the phone to me every 8 weeks or so, them demanding money, and me showing them I paid.
Eventually one person on the phone went "...Er.... were you aware we sent you a refund on the dd/mm/yy? The notes don't show any reason why, can you check your credit card statement for that month?". And then slowly we pieced together that they had refunded me about 6 months after I took out the policy, and they never noticed until some spreadsheet somewhere was showing I had an outstanding balance and they passed it automatically to debt collectors.
Similar for me with BA, but it was me chasing them to get a refund. They had rebooked us on a next-day flight after a missed connection due to their own delay. A few days later they took some payments on the credit card that had paid for the tickets, but we only noticed 6 months later. The amount corresponded to a booking change fee, so we asked for a refund. For almost a year they simply refused with excuses from "we always charge fees when you amend your booking" to a surreal "we are sorry you had a technical issue with your booking and that prices have gone up by the time you completed your purchase". The 10th customer relation rep finally seemed to understand our problem, and asked to confirm the booking refs and payment dates, then replied that the charges were related to a different booking that we had just forgotten about (we had used airmiles so only paid a small booking fee which turned out to be the same as a change fee...). This could have been sorted after my first email if only they hadn't gone straight to the bullshit-excuse generator.
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