Hi Everyone,
Bringing out this review on my experiences with ICICI Pru Life so far. I have been using them for insurance for the past year or so!
The Good:
1) Quick respose when I wanted to purchase the policy, very helpful agent who came home and explained almost everything to me and got me interested in a ULIP as opposed to the term plan I had in mind initially.
2) Nice interactive website, which enabled me to do almost all transactions online, from knowing the corpus built up, right up to the Advisors name and contact details, I couldnt ask for more! Leave aside the fact that I never recieved my welcome pack as yet!
3) Statements request was processed very fast and ICICI were proactive in realising that their customers would require a consolidated premium reciept at the end of year for Tax purposes!
The Bad:
1) Did not send my welcome pack to me till date, to be fair I did change my address hence there could have been a confusion due to this fact, but I fail to understand why they would send me statements to my old address despite informing them that I have moved house!
2) Online payment gateway is a farce, it never seems to work, with a "page cannot be displayed error" coming up after submitting the transaction info. BUT THIS IS ACTUALLY CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD!
Which brings me back to:
The UGLY:
1) I had heard that ICICI customer care is the best in the financial industry, nothing could have been worse than ICICI in my experience. Heres the lowdown on why I say this:
I have gone through absolute hell with ICICI customer care over the past 2 months or so. As mentioned earlier I made an online payment on the ICICI website as I had a shortage of funds in my bank account owing to another investment, as mentioned earlier the message "Page cannot be displayed" came up when I completed the transaction. Any sane person would have thought that the transaction was not processed coz of the website failure, hence I proceeded to make the payment once more, again got the same error. I left it there and proceeded to make the next payment on the 25th of Feb again using their website, this time the transaction was successful and I got an acknowledgement for the same.
Imagine my surprise when I checked my credit card statement and found that I was charged THRICE! Apparently, the payments were processed despite getting the error that the page could not be displayed!
Then started my calls to customer care to get the excess amount refunded to me, I had a gut feeling that this was going to be a long winded battle, so wherever possible, I went ahead and recorded my conversations with customer care.
They promised to refund the money(Rs.3000) to me ASAP. I was convinced that this would happen soon and forgot about it. I checked my statement in a week and found that Rs.1500 has been credited back into my card account from ICICI, hence rang them again saying that I have recd. Rs.1500 but had to get Rs.3000. They apologised and said that this will be done ASAP again. I Figured that since I had already recd. a refund for half the amoutn, it would be a cakewalk! I couldnt have been more wrong. Suffice it to say that I still havent recd. the refund of Rs.1500. I have spent nearly Rs.200 on calling ICICI, Unlimited emails sent with no response, useless chat support who do not do anything and lie to you, I wouldnt wish this kind of service even to my enemies!
Their supervisor says we will refund you and call you in 24hrs to confirm, which is never done. I have a log of all chats and calls, so if ICICI is not going to pull up their socks soon, I will be forced to take action agains them.
AVOID PRU LIFE AT ALL COSTS!
UPDATE 21/04/2008
What can I say? This is the 2nd issue that mouthshut has helped me get a speedy resolution to!
First user Saurabh82 proactively contacted me and then I had a mail from their customer relations team as well! To cut a long story short, my refund has been credited to by bank account!