We may have opened a can of worms last week when we highlighted how a couple had to wait eight months for their insurer Allianz to resolve a case of a stolen car and the story prompted other readers to detail their own tricky experiences with insurers.

“Our car was smashed up by another vehicle in early September,” begins the mail from Donal. “We had parked ours in a regular parking space on a main street, while we went to have coffee.”

He says that when they were done with their coffee they went back to the car and “found a major scene. A passing driver had lost control and driven into our car, and then into a nearby house, causing major damage. Nobody was injured, and the gardaí managed the situation well. We understood that the third party’s insurer was accepting liability.”

He says that “under Garda direction, the third party vehicle and ours were towed away. We haven’t seen ours since.”

He says that they could not get an emergency car from their insurer and “had to transport our bags and other items to the railway station and get the train back to Dublin. We started corresponding with the insurers on Monday morning.”

The early contact with the other driver’s insurance company “seemed encouraging at first. Importantly, they provided a replacement vehicle within a few days. The processing of our claim however has been much slower than initial indications suggested. I have found that nearly all the running, in terms of follow-up, fell to me. This goes for both companies.

“I have lost count of the number of calls I have had to make, of the number of different people I have spoken to, and of the time wasted in simply holding on,” he writes.

He says that takes him “to a more general point. Since Covid, in particular, it has become almost impossible to contact customer service in very many organisations. They are always ‘exceptionally busy’. I no longer buy that story. Regulators surely have a responsibility to ensure that their ‘clients’ provide a minimum standard of service. I doubt if they do any monitoring in this area. That is unacceptable.”

He points out that his insurer had “excellent customer service when we first signed up. The standard is way below acceptable now. They are not alone,” he continues and says that his health insurance provider “used to offer a wonderful service on the phone. More often than not, I have to abandon my recent attempts to make contact. Is there anything you can do about this dire situation? Are the regulators asleep at the wheel? Do the companies care?”

We also heard from Anthony who is a retired insurance broker “who worked in the industry when I could get immense job satisfaction from my daily work. It is many the negotiations I was involved in dealing with claims on behalf of clients. I can only recollect one specific claim in all that time where I was enraged at the attitude of a claims official. He had thought the claimant had had a third set of car keys made and then colluded in the theft of the car. It got settled eventually,” he says

He writes that he keeps in contact with some brokers still trading “and their observations on the current behaviours of insurance companies do not bear repeating”.

He also documents recent experiences he had with the sector as a private citizen.

“I had three separate engagements with insurers on claims, one of them involving a household claim of my own. My expansion tank burst and we were able to turn off the supply of water before any serious damage was done. I submitted the claim, knowing at the time that it was not covered. I thought there was a chance that through their lack of knowledge, they would pay. They didn’t and that was okay. However, it took them a total of eight months to decide to reject the claim,” he says.

He suggests that “there is nobody in an insurance office any longer who actually knows what their policies actually cover” and he points to one insurer that has a small number of senior staff in their 60s with the rest in their 20s. “What do you make of that for continuation planning? I am so glad to be out of it.”