‘Mistake’ cost account holder months of angst
Retrenched customer hounded for money and blacklisted despite protection plan insurance
IT’S never fair to tar a whole category of people with the same brush, but when it comes to the customer care staff of corporate South Africa, it’s sometimes very hard not to.
We all know the type: no initiative, no interest, no courtesy. Their inability to problem-solve, or — heaven forbid — escalate an issue, causes untold frustration and drama for consumers.
Of course, there are thousands of exceptions; friendly, efficient employees who do their companies proud. Unfortunately, the various Edgars and Hollard insurance employees who interacted with reader LesleyLynn Louw would appear not to be among them.
This story has a happy ending, but only because a determined Louw refused to take no for an answer.
When the 28-year-old from Brackenfell in Cape Town was retrenched from her new import/export admin job in February, she still had a car to pay off, living expenses to fund — and a monthly R1 000 account payment to Edgars.
Her saving grace, she thought, was the account protection plan insurance she had paid since opening the retail account in 2011. The plan, which cost her 35c for each R100 she owed monthly, promised to cover any outstanding balance if she was retrenched.
But when Louw made her claim to Edgars, it was rejected on the grounds that she hadn’t been in her current job for a full six months. Louw was two weeks shy of the policy’s exclusion period when she lost her job. She immediately objected, claiming she’d never been told of such an exclusion.
But both Edgars and Hollard, which underwrites the policy, refused to budge.
Even when she pointed out that she’d been at her previous job for more than three years before resigning to take the new job, during which time she had always paid the protection plan fee, nobody offered to investigate. She was simply told she could pay R200 for two months only (which she did), but would thereafter have to either pay her arrears in full (now almost R5 000 with interest added), along with continued monthly instalments, or pay the full R13 000 balance as settlement.
When she couldn’t comply, she was hounded for the money, eventually handed over to debt collectors and listed at the credit bureau.
Louw, who applied online for her account, said she was offered the retrenchment product the following day when phoned by the call centre. She is adamant the exclusion was not pointed out, nor was she sent any paperwork.
DISPUTED CLAUSE: Edgars and Hollard staff appear to have misunderstood an insurance policy
“I need help fighting this, please,” she e-mailed me. “I am being treated unfairly. I had no knowledge of this six-month rule.”
To add insult to injury, she was told that, even if she settled the account and found a new job, it was highly unlikely Edgars would give her an account again. “Not that I’d ever want another account there; I want nothing to do with Edgars,” said Louw.
When I approached Edcon, which owns Edgars, an investigation was sparked at senior level there and at Hollard.
The upshot? It was all a terrible mistake. Her claim had been valid all along and would now be honoured. And the adverse listing related to the incident would be removed.
According to Hollard, its policy terms state a policyholder must have been continuously employed for six months for a claim to be valid. It said that because the time between an account opening and a claim can be substantial, it relied on employment information supplied to it at claim stage.
“In this case we only received information relating to the current role,” said spokesman Warwick Bloom. Louw, meanwhile, said the claim form she filled in didn’t require information on previous employment.
Due to a “breakdown in communication”, Louw’s complaint to Edcon after the repudiation was not escalated to Hollard for review, Bloom said.
“It is very unfortunate that
Her saving grace, she thought, was the account protection plan insurance she had paid since 2011
the complaint had to be escalated to you before being resolved,” he said.
Hollard, which along with Edgars had apologised to Louw, would immediately conduct a refresher course on the product
Edgars threw me under a bus. You have to wonder how many other customers this has happened to
as there were “clearly processrelated problems both at application and at claims stage”, Bloom said.
Edgars said that with the claim now being honoured by Hollard, Edcon would request a credit bureau update to reflect Louw’s status as “current”. It declined to comment on the way Edgars staff handled the case.
“Edgars threw me under a bus,” said Louw, who is still jobless. “You have to wonder how many other customers this has happened to.”
Tune in to Power FM 98.7’s ‘Power Breakfast’ at 8.50am tomorrow to hear more from Megan