Complaints – Worst performing policies revealed

Home emergency cover is the worst performer in the insurance complaints league table, according to exclusive research from Insurance Times.

Home emergency cover products had 888 complaints referred to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) between April and September 2017, with 45% of those upheld in favour of the customer – the highest of all products over that period.

Home emergency cover is intended to cover a narrowly defined set of risks with a multitude of exclusions, and this isn’t always made clear to the purchaser, according to CII professional standards director Melissa Collett, who was previously senior ombudsman at the FOS).

“The insurance company is selling a product that isn’t intended to have a huge amount of cover, and people don’t understand the product that well,” she says.

Collett says insurers can help drive down the number of complaints they receive for Home Emergency products, and other classes of business, by ensuring all exclusions are made clear before the product is sold.

One insurer engaging well with the FOS is LV=.

“One of the reasons we don’t have many complaints referred to FOS is our customers trust that the situation we get to is the best we can get to,” said LV= operational services director Rodney Assock.

For full details of the FOS complaints data and a complete league table of all insurers, click here.