Online Insurance Renewal Problems: ICICI Lombard and HDFC Ergo

Insurance companies very well know the potential of the online channel for insurance registrations and renewals. Selling policies online helps them to make significant savings as they no longer need to pay commissions to the agents. That is the reason why all insurance products such as cars, 2 wheelers, health, travel, home, personal, life insurance, etc. are available to buy online.

Despite being aware of this online advantage, most of the insurance companies are lagging behind when it comes to being customer friendly. There is a good amount of improvement possible in current online setup of most insurance companies. Below is an account of my experience in online insurance renewal.

I was trying to renew my motor policy online on ICICI Lombard and HDFC Ergo websites but faced problems on both sites. Here is a summary -

ICICI Lombard issue:
While trying to renew my motor policy on ICICI Lombard website (previous policy was also of ICICI), I was able to get a quote, add/edit services (like insurance for unnamed passengers) but when I moved forward to make payment, I encountered this system error -
"Sorry for the inconvenience. Error in User Entry: Deal is expired or deactivated. For any assistance, Please call us on our Toll Free Number 1800 2666 or email us at customersupport@icicilombard.com"

This error is coming consistently for many days now. I raised the concern with customer care also but they could not provide a solution as yet. I hope they come up with a way out soon before my policy expires.

HDFC ERGO issue:
Given the problem on ICICI Lombard website, I decided to try HDFC Ergo . Here also I was able to provide the required details, get a quote , add/edit services but when I tried to buy the policy I again got a system error. This time it was the format of the previous policy number. The policy number from ICICI was of the form : XXXX/W­-XXXXXXXX/00/000 but HDFC Ergo was not recognizing it as a valid policy no. (It seems that they don’t expect special characters, alphabets etc. in a policy number). They had a huge warning put up that if the policy number doesn’t match the one given in your policy document then they can cancel your policy.

In both the cases, the customer is stuck and not able to buy the policy online. For consumers accustomed to easy and fast online shopping, this is a very frustrating experience.

The problems mentioned above could be easily done away with by better understanding of web systems. Ideally insurance companies should be able to measure their failure rates for people who accept the quote and want to make payment and figure out the reasons for failure regularly. This is very important for customer retention and many e-retails are continuously doing this day in and day out.