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Has anyone been asked to do any repairs for this company? They are a small company in York providing specialist insurance products including appliance breakdown cover.
I don’t usually do insurance work, but they agreed to pay my £40 diagnostic fee up front. They instructed me to get authorisation before proceeding with repairs. It turned out to be a simple brush replacement job, but I was taken aback when they refused to cover the breakdown as wear and tear is excluded from the policy.
Is this normal practice with appliance cover? How far can they take this, as aren’t 80{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} of appliance failures caused by component wear and tear anyway?
Re: General Legal Protection Ltd
Yes undertaken a couple of calls for them and apart from a couple of slight payment delays have had no problems at all.
That’s said we asked what was covered and what wasn’t before we did anything parts wise and yes they classed worn brushes as general wear and tear which we thought was ridiculous.
We now get authorisation on every repair involving a part AND charge a second visit fee as a result of them being ridiculous with wear and tear.
We do lots if warranty and insurance work for many insurers and most are not this pernickety with what’s covered and what isn’t, but every client is different.
Not much help to you I know.
Best wishes
Jackal
Re: General Legal Protection Ltd
I guess the definition of what constitutes wear and tear depends on the terms which, in turn, I would expect reflected in the costs.
To draw a comparison…
If I insure my car with a voluntary £650 excess the premium is lower than if I elected to only expose myself to £250 of excess. Some offer legal cover and cost more, some don’t and cost less. Same with breakdown, windscreen cover and all the other bits and bobs.
Same deal with warrantees on cars and other mechanical stuff, it usually will not cover wear and tear or consumables.
We all know this. We all accept this without question. Even if some bleat about it on occasion.
I was looking at something the other day in relation to a tumble dryer where the TOC had blown repeatedly and then an ISE one where it blew due to a high room temperature. But the thought had struck me in the past with cooker ones as some Smeg’s kept popping them.
Is it a warranty repair?
When you delve into it you can say that it is a “Thermal Overload Cutout” and therefore effectively little more than a fuse that is blown due to overheating.
Of course that can happen if there’s a faulty thermostat for sure and, that’s a legitimate reason why it would fail.
But, there isn’t another one.
It can only be caused by a blockage or poor filter maintenance, room temperature, poor ventilation and so on. Given we’re not idiots we know this and yet often we can’t be bothered to argue about it, even if it is the customer’s fault that it acted as it should. Bear in mind, it is designed to blow to protect, that’s the point of it.
You look at carbons and bearings, why do they fail?
Sure you can get duff ones but they’ll usually go in short order IME and not hang about for a couple of years and then just decide to fail for no apparent reason. Again, we’re not idiots, we know that a faulty brush will stick and you’ll see one okay and the other knackered, but we replace the set and, quite rightly so.
But if they’re worn down, well, there’s really only one possible explanation unless every single one does the same thing.
Bearings, faulty seal will cause them to go quickly or poor fitting, no doubt about it at all.
But if they go after a couple of years the chances are that the machine is getting a hammering and they’re wearing out through high use. It’s of course completely reasonable to say that they could be expected to last longer, just like carbon brushes, but what was the design brief in terms of durability? We don’t know.
You can safely surmise though that, at the lower end of the market, they’d be looking for them doing 600 hours to 1500 hours at best. For both.
Which is fine for light use. Not so good for anything more than that as they will wear out.
My point being that we all aren’t stupid or, at least I certainly hope we’re not, and we know that if you get a mechanical thing and subject it to use beyond it’s design was intended for, will either wear out or just break. That, I would argue in a good many cases, is a far more common cause of failure than a lot of things.
Is that the fault of the maker or, again I would argue in many cases equally if not more so, the fault of the customer for not buying goods that were designed for and fitted their particular needs and purpose?
It is endemic in this industry and a number of others that customer’s “wants” are just accepted and that is to a point fine and dandy. But it both annoys and anuses me that if the same punter went out and bought a Ka then did 90,000 miles in a year repping in it would accept that the engine failed and had to be replaced at their cost after 9 months with no problem. They’d just shrug their shoulders and accept it was their fault for being stupid and buying the wrong product.
Yet in this industry, it’s somehow completely different. I can’t see how that is or how we got there.
As to General Legal, they seem to have three different levels of cover, what each actually will cover I didn’t dig into so I guess that, like my car insurance, it may be based on what cover I took.
If they have a half decent engineer on hand looking at claims then it’s pretty easy to spot the ones that are wear and tear related and reject accordingly. Most big insurers can’t be bothered or don’t want the costs to do that (even if it costs them a fortune in our eyes) or, it’s worth more to keep the customer than fight the invalid claims. Could even be that in the grand scheme of things it’s not worth the grief, I don’t know.
Or, it may be that some customers take the proverbial and they want shot of them as they cost too much to keep.
This is a vastly complex subject with a lot of nuances IMO and not as simplistic as it may at first appear.
On the other hand, they may just be cr4p. 😉
K.
Re: General Legal Protection Ltd
Jackal wrote:We do lots if warranty and insurance work for many insurers and most are not this pernickety with what’s covered and what isn’t, but every client is different.
Is it possible that more insurance companies may well be adopting this clause regarding wear and tear in future do you think?
Re: General Legal Protection Ltd
The lesson I learned was not to visit the customer at 4:45. When I rang the insurer for authorisation at 4:55, they had already switched their phones through to their out of hours answering service, who didn’t have a clue what I was ringing about.
After the customer had spoken to the insurer the next day, she asked me to return and complete the repair, at her cost. My total income for the job was the same, but I had to make an extra journey.
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