1 /5 Dominique Postell: Terrible customer service. If you have home/car insurance through them beware of penalties that will be billed towards you-even if you have your insurance paid through your mortgage, they will attempt to collect payment from YOU instead of communicating with the mortgage company first, then they will give you grief about how hard it is to communicate with the mortgage company...which is basically part of their job.
Due to this, I had to become my own insurance agent-conduct phone calls to my mortgage company and to this agency just to figure out how to settle the new policy payment and missed payment according to their instruction. Kelly and Estella were wanting me to pay up the new home policy two months in advance to its actual date due as a penalty for canceling my car insurance bundled with my home insurance and for having a difference owed to them. When speaking with Estella she was urging me to call my insurance and have them overnight a check for to pay up the new policy (she wanted me to basically do her job for her), otherwise my policy would be cancelled and that that would be bad since I would not find another agency to give me a policy at that great of a rate. This was a load of you-know-what-I was actually able to find an agency that offered the same policy at a BETTER rate. After having to go through hoops to figure out the logistics of the policy and payment (and after the bad experience with my car insurance) I decided to cancel my home insurance with them. To which their reply was Oh well you will have to provide that request in a letter-you can not verbally request. So I proceeded to send an email with a letter attached as instructed.
I follow up within a week to inquire about my prorated refund on the account to find out they actually cancelled my policy two days prior to the date I request in my letter. When I ask about it Estella tells me I dont know what to tell you, and basically insists there is nothing she can do to honor the date I requested. Upon further research (and an awesome new insurance agency to help) basically within the state of CA there is a way to amend/retroact a home policy to fix cancellation dates and errors as such. This is worth knowing because your mortgage company will penalize/charge you if there is a lapse in insurance coverage. Estella and Kelly did not want to fix the error in dates because that would require them admitting their mistake and doing their job!
Luckily, (after having to sit on the phone for over an hour) Farmers customer service was able to fix this. I had to resort to calling the 1-800 number for Farmers after several attempts to call Kelly and Estella and my call going unanswered (basically they were screening my calls and avoiding them at this point).
To add the cherry on top theres more...following my letter of cancellation I received someone elses receipt of payment via email-which is basically a violation of their privacy policy! Phew! If after reading this you are exasperated yourself, then do yourself a favor and switch insurance-there are plenty more agencies who will actually have your back and look out for your best interest instead of trying to go over your head if they think they can get away with it like Kelly and Estella did with me. And no...the other agencies will not be more expensive than what you pay with this agency, no its not a hard big hassle to switch either, and yes there are local awesome companies who actually deserve your service. ;) Thanks to Estella and Kelly I think they might have some future competition concerning agents-after all, I have learned so much from having to clean up their mess.
