"American Family Insurance
My opinions, ratings, are summarized by saying this is one of the worst companies I have ever dealt with. I have WAY too many stories to itemize here but I will list several of my examples below. Overall I have found them not to be trustworthy, knowledgeable about their OWN processes, slow to respond, and most of all they set the record for making ridiculous/silly excuses why they cannot do something simple or answer a question. My frustration led to having my wife deal with them towards the end (cancellation) as she had previous years of experience as a licensed insurance agent/broker in a past job.
1. I am a detailed oriented person so I asked and verified the answers to my questions originally in person with the agent. Almost 100% of her answers were wrong leading to many frustrating conversations after the insurance policy went into force.
2. Further frustration came from the flood of excuses for no answers or wrong answers and were exasperated by their “24 hour Customer Service” I was assured of. The majority of time I called several different departments through their 1-800 line I did get a “live” person in a call center (no specific insurance knowledge –just call forwarders) who forwarded me to an “answering machine” in various departments telling me to leave a message and they would try to get back to me sometime Monday thru Friday during their limited working hours. I find this disingenuous and borderline unethical to call this “24 Hour Customer Service”.
3. Among the many assurances I was given was that if I paid the whole premium for the year immediately that the price was locked in until the next renewal (insurance companies don’t raise rates between renewal periods). I asked numerous times if this was clearly understood between us and it was a big selling point for the agent. Two months later I receive a letter upping my car insurance rates.
4. Another letter informed me on a separate subject that they could not give me their best rate because of my “credit financial information”. After MANY frustrating calls demanding specifics (my wife and I make a lot of money, our house is paid off, my 2010 car is paid off, we keep our credit cards paid off and as Credit Karma reports online – our score is “excellent) they finally agreed to tell me the specifics. They called it “insufficient history” (I have a forty year credit history) and explained that if we opened a new credit card account this would count against us and (I love this one) that if we did not show a history of charging to ALL of our credit cards every month it would work against us. I asked both the AMfam company finance person that gave me this information as well as the agent assigned to me if “this did not sound crazy to you, and do YOU charge to all of your cards EVERY month?” I was told of course they did not charge and would not offer an opinion as to how crazy and scam oriented this was (they sounded afraid).
5. Information such as costs and eventually refund information took the agent and other “customer services” personnel many hours or days to get answers to (they would call and get answering machines within their own contact list –is EVERYONE consistently out of the office??). Their competitors that I have dealt with gave immediate answers on the spot.
6. I finally found out my refund and am told I may see it in “weeks” in my past dealings with their competitors (Geico, Progressive, etc) when I made changes or cancelled they just made immediate credits to the credit card I used to pay with.
7. The overwhelming frustration was the number of times I heard from my agent and several other “customer service” American Family Insurance agents that “only the underwriter has that information” or “that’s something that is out of my control”. Again my wife had to remind the agent that they are our advocate – especially for easy reasonable questions – they are not just there to cash their commission checks. My experience with American Family Insurance was that about 90% of their people were not competent in much of anything other than mastering the art of excuses why they could not do even the simplest tasks. The other 10% tried, but seemed to have their hands tied --- one corporate rep told me concerning the issues I had that “We leave these in the hands of the local agents”- who told me “I can’t answer that or take action without the underwriter”. This just left us in limbo and VERY DISSATISFIED customers.
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