We often say ‘You just can’t get the staff’ when something goes wrong, but poor service from providers is no laughing matter for advisers.
One adviser is so fed up with being put on hold, receiving paperwork containing errors, and lengthy delays in processing applications that he is creating a ‘blacklist’ of the worst offenders.
First Wealth managing director Anthony Villis revealed his plans on LinkedIn recently and was inundated with support from fellow advisers. While most were sympathetic to the difficulties providers faced at the start of the pandemic, they agreed that, one year on, service standards had become ridiculous.
“Sometimes you’ve got call waiting times of 60 to 90 minutes so, if you’ve got to call that company five or six times, that’s six or seven hours wasted,” Villis told Money Marketing.
He is now writing to the chief executives of firms on his blacklist to give them a right to reply and a chance to clean up their act. He will be making public the names of any who do nothing in response.
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“These are household names making lots of profit. They hold themselves up as being all about customer service but they treat customers with contempt and they treat the advisers who look after them with contempt,” says Villis.
“Enough is enough. Wherever we can, we will not do any new business with any of these companies and, as long as it’s in the client’s best interests, we will move assets away from them.”
Big names
Responses to Villis’s LinkedIn post vehemently condemned poor service from a range of big names, such as Clerical Medical, Prudential, Royal London and Standard Life. One that crops up again and again is Aviva.
An adviser told Money Marketing he lost a client because the company took three months to request a GP report in support of a protection application.
“Aviva kept making mistakes with the form, not chasing it up and largely ignoring my emails,” he said. “I understand people make mistakes, but they didn’t correct it properly. I never got an apology. The client didn’t like it and didn’t understand it was nothing to do with me, so I lost them.”
An Aviva spokesperson said the firm was unable to comment on specific cases without the full details but, if it fell short on service, it welcomed the opportunity to look into things further.
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Another adviser spent four months trying to get Aviva to work out whether a pension contract had guaranteed annuities attached. He was put on hold, given conflicting information and had to chase it up constantly. However, the adviser says Phoenix and Reassure win the award for the worst service.
“They’ve bought up insurance companies and, because they’ve got no new money coming in, they’re not going to invest in the corporate structure,” he says.
Reassure’s takeover of Legal & General policies has come under significant fire from advisers this year, with Yvonne Goodwin Wealth Management director Yvonne Goodwin calling for the regulator to get involved, in a column for Money Marketing in April.
A Reassure spokesperson says the pandemic and the migration of almost a million policies from L&G in September contributed to longer-than-normal waiting times across some processes, but extra staff and enhancements to online services have helped reduce these.
A Phoenix Group spokesperson says: “We handle legacy products, which can be complex in nature, resulting in a small number of cases taking longer than we would like to process.”
They add the firm is building a new digital portal for advisers to help service clients.
Will this adviser rebellion finally mark a turning point in poor provider service? Something has got to give.
As another adviser told us: “How do you compensate for your time other than pass it on to the client? And why should they pay more for inferior service?”
This article featured in the June 2021 edition of MM.
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Still using the pandemic as an excuse?
I have dealt with Aviva for many years, they have great staff, who are always helpful, but when it comes to Doctor’s reports, they are right at the bottom, when it comes to service.
When I have a client who might not be of standard health, I have to delete Aviva from my search list, as I know if a medical report is needed, it will take months and months to get a decision.
This is not a new occurrence due to the pandemic but lack of service that goes back years.
Fully behind this. I recently dealt with a client who wished to fully withdraw a small pension scheme. Due to the length of time it took to get the relevant papers and two sets of incorrect documents being issued by Prudential the application crossed taxed years which could financially disadvantage the client. Did Prudential care? Not one bit. I call this service risk. No matter how unique or cheap a product is one day it will be a legacy product like all others before it, and will suffer the same appalling service levels as legacy products currently do. I also will not use such companies and if correct for the client move them away from such arrangements if appropriate.
No they are not!!!!!! Think about it,,,, Post RDR is all all about Charges, Abbey Life charged its Post 1988 pension at least! £5.25 P/month Policy fee, 5% Bid and offer spread, plus a 1.25% AMC, now were are looking at the likes of Royal London at 0.45% flat. And I have just found a GPP at, 0.165 all in!!! the product providers are simply saying who’s going to pay,,,,Clearly its the Client, as the servicing standerds are none existant, It seems to me the Networks in our the industry are taking the crust, the providers who used thier charges to provide the SALESMAN have almost gone, apart from the likes S.J.P.
Robert I believe this is a true reflection of what has happened everyone is looking at costs and forgetting that good service costs.
After 40 years in this honourable profession, I can confirm that some things do not change very much …
The Insurance / investment industry still considers the source of the majority of their business (the Adviser Profession) to be something that they deeply detest having to deal with.
Their thinking and attitude towards themselves is that they are more important than us, and they only deal with us because they have to.
I am not entirely sure why this is the case.
The worst one that I am dealing with at the moment, one which involves three different pension companies, and one that I have wrestled with on numerous occasions in the last 40 years, is where the pension company refuses to provide policyholder information to me, despite the fact that the policyholder (my client) has provided clear and concise written instructions for them to do so.
Their refusal is dressed up as some obscure contractual fact that they see the Trustees of the Group Personal Pension (or similar) as the owner of the investment and not the policyholder.
My rejoinder to them is to stop fooling around, get whatever permissions they see fit from their Trustees, and then provide my and the policyholder (my client) with the information to which it is their RIGHT to receive when they request it.
Simple eh ? Client and policyholder service eh ? To be helpful and constructive eh ?
I would have thought that the PA of some minion in the Pensions Regulator could have sorted this repetitive situation out with the pensions industry within a coffee break on a Monday morning decades ago … but no
The three companies to whom I refer, who are currently playing this silly game with me, were requested this simple policy information in November last year – we wait and remind them regularly.
Aviva
Reassure
Phoenix
Wouldn’t you just guess …
Sadly Trevor, yes, those are I am sure three of the companies most of us would have guessed were involved.
What particularly irks me is the recorded announcement that the volume of calls is “unprecedented”. They have been “unprecedented” for years…..
When I first went independent, in 1997, I thought the service from most companies was fine. Over the years it has become farcically bad.
I seem to remember I have said here, before now, that I charge companies for wasting my time, if the delays are excessive or they keep making mistakes. My reasoning is that I would, otherwise, have to charge the client for my extra time, which would be totally unfair. Most companies pay up and I have, on occasion, received two hundred pounds or more, after providing them with an invoice (list of work, time spent on calls etc. (which they can usually trace). I have also received as little as £25 but it depends on how much time I have lost.
They are all terrible.
They were all terrible at the start the pandemic. We accept a bit of that.
They are all equally terrible, or even deteriorating now.
Some, like Pru and Clerical Medical, have implemented system changes which have failed or collapsed.
All of this should be a regulatory hanging offence. But it seems that the FCA have been coerced from above (oh, I love the so-called “independence”) or chosen to back off.
All of that is utterly appalling, both provider and regulator.
What are we to expect in the future? The same. So many of these companies want to extend the self-same WFH that patently didn’t properly work at outset, doesn’t work now, has been poorly overseen, with poor training, poor monitoring and poor communication. The bedwetters at Stratford who also love WFH and cannot be bothered to go on a field visit to see what is failing, will not administer the regulatory punishment. So customers will have been failed like never before. What happened to the customer being always right?
Open a bank account? Forget it.
Its laughable, that I have sat here listening to the FCA banging on about “consumer detriment” for about a decade since they coined the phrase, when here we are now, and they are utterly complicit in allowing the worst detriment to occur since regulation was brought in in 1986. Pensions unpaid, policy payouts 3-6 months late and wrong, response times to letters of over 4 months and invariably incomplete.
Am I cross? Hell, you bet.I have wasted the last fifteen months fighting on a daily basis for our clients’ entitlements, or reversing badly handled examples of mistreatment all at a time when our own income is also diminishing.