laremy.sg

Last year, I wrote about how convenient your service was when it came to renewing my motorcycle insurance.

NOW LOOK AT THE MONSTER YOU HAVE BECOME:

AND ON YOUR WEBSITE:

What is – I don’t even – which hamster told you that customers are desirous of this heinous pigletry???

I don’t want to “call [my] agent or [your] 24-hour hotline” because I don’t need to talk to a human being to do this.

I just want to click a button and give you my money so that you can insure Le Poots and I – that is all.

Like what you see in this picture here, just in case you’ve forgotten what convenience and customer service is all about:

At the same time, it seems my premium has increased to $322.58. Why?

If you think this is an uneducated grouse, don’t worry – I know what the basic principles of insurance entail.

Nevertheless, my question centres on a logical Key Performance Indicator that all efficient insurers should adopt (or should have at least adopted), and that is: insurers must aim to maintain or reduce the year-on-year premiums that a customer has to pay.

But why can’t insurers meet that aim in Singapore?

Is it because of:

• Bad practices and policies with regard to letting drivers and motor workshops inflate claim amounts?
• No one wanting to take the lead by doing the morally correct thing and streamlining/shaking-up the claims process so that us consumers can benefit from ethical decisions?

I have no ready answers.

But if anything, ladies and gentlemen, this is yet another reason why we need honest and customer-oriented people in charge of the organisations and institutions in our country.

…we follow the path of least resistance.

An e-mail reply from MSIG.

An e-mail reply from AXA.

What is presented to me when I log on to the Income website.

My scooter insurance’s up for renewal; I’m with NTUC Income but I thought I’d scout around to see if I could get a better offer from another company.

Out of all the agencies I e-mailed, only two got back to me, and in no uncertain terms, informed me that they weren’t hard up for my money so I could very kindly f*** off and leave them alone.

Or it could have just been bad customer service.

To MSIG’s credit (or discredit?), the e-mail was copied to two reps, one of whom actually forwarded my message to Commercial Agency Pte Ltd, and an agent quoted me a premium of $350.96 on the same terms that NTUC Income offered.

Except, of course:

• Income’s premium is lower,
• it’s giving me a 5% loyalty discount which reduces the premium even more AND
• I have complete ease of renewal – one click, enter my credit card details and I’m done.

Moral of the story: make it easy for your customers to get what they want, and you’ll keep them, even if it’s just to make $300 off of them for another year.

I’ve been trying to arrange meetings/consultations sessions with students and it’s not always possible because of our different timetables. I’m now trying to find a free online appointment booking system that integrates with Google Calendars to serve two purposes:

1. Allow students to ‘book’ a meeting slot with me based on mine and their available meeting times without much hassle.
2. Automatically ‘pull’ info from my Google Calendar to determine when I’m free/when I’m not free + ‘push’ info to my Google Calendar to automatically update my schedule for me.

I don’t think anyone has come up with something like this yet so if any computing whiz wants to work on this, I’d say go for it (and let me know when you do come up with this so that I can use it! It’s my brainchild after all!). You can most likely sell it to companies/organisations that need this service when you’re done creating the program for it.

You may, if you wish, download the latest version of Full Tank! from my wiki. I have only included material up till Act One (or what I have always thought of as Act One, at least) for your reading pleasure.

RATIONALE:

1. You can buy tickets knowing what the writing is like. It may not appeal to you or it may make you more interested in watching the play – I don’t know, because it could go either way. But at least have a read first so that you know what you’re buying.
2. Knowing what you’re buying is important for me, so I’d like to think it’d be important for my ‘customers’ too. I hope theatre productions can start to move in this direction, so if they do, you know who started the trend… LOL.
3. Act Two isn’t included so there is some element of suspense + no need for a ‘spoiler alert’.

Enjoy!

DISCLAIMER: As I mentioned earlier, I think, like, only five people are going to be interested in this. So if you are not one of the five people, you may carry on surfing porn or the like, or whatever it is you are wont to do on the Ingterneck.

~

So. Part of the dirty little secret is that as part of OTOT publicity, we’ve been involved in e-mail and face-to-face interviews, pre-recorded radio broadcasts, etc. Now, one very interesting publicity activity/event of sorts which I’ve had to do is to answer two questions via e-mail for The Sunday Times.

My responses are going to be used in a Lifestyle section called ‘Bookends’, which contains information about books that a particular person is reading. I expect it’ll be published next Sunday, since I didn’t see it appear in yesterday’s copy of The Sunday Times.

Now, as we all may or may not know, Gilbert Koh a.k.a. Mr Wang of Mr Wang Says So fame launched his book of poetry last Fri. So, me being me, I decided to take a chance and ask the publishers if I could purchase a copy of Two Baby Hands before its launch, because the deadline for submitting my answers to the ‘Bookends’ column was way before the launch date. Suffice to say, the publishers said yes, and I became a proud owner of Two Baby Hands the week before last!

So this is the dirty little secret that I’ve had to keep for a week or so, because I thought it would’ve been rather immoral for me to gallumph around telling everyone about my purchase.

But what’s the big deal, you may ask, hypothetically, since only five persons are supposed to be reading this, and not all five of those persons may be of the question-asking genus. Some may not even be persons at all, but that is another story for another time.

Well, I’ve been reading Gilbert Koh since 2002/3 when I chanced upon “Chiang’s Heat Stroke” in an anthology called From Boys to Men: A Literary Anthology of National Service in Singapore. So it’s a big deal to me, because I’m a big fan of Singapore + Malaysian Literature, and Mr Wang Says So and Gilbert Koh and… Yeah. You get the idea. Also, I thought it was very good business sense on the part of Ethos Books so I wanted to share this with everyone, in case something similar crops up in your own life in the future.

So! I’ll be blogging about my answers and why I talked about those books some time next week (or the week after) regardless of whether the Bookends column is published or not (because the silence will give me something to talk about too). In the meantime, keep on supporting Singapore + Malaysian literature!