September 2018 by Albert McGraw
Let me take you on the journey I'm still sorting through, and I'll let you, the reader, decide if a 1 star rating is warranted.
The year is 2013. It's October. I'm a new parent, and just bought my first house (yay!). We'd been using Bob Ward's office for a while now, and it seems pretty logical to use the same office that has given me such excellent service for the insurance on my home. So I add a homeowners policy onto the auto policy I already have (3x vehicles, 2x full coverage).
Fast forward to April of 2018.
Now, I'm human, and have made mistakes in the past. However, in the past when I've neglected to make a payment, Bob Ward's office would contact me and I'd immediately settle my account. Well, this past April I decided to enroll in the automatic bill pay system when I received a call from Bob's office about forgetting another payment.
Easy stuff. Open the email they sent, print out the forum, sign it, scan it back in, and send it off.
After that email got sent, I stopped getting calls about missing payments. Unbeknownst to me, that form never made it into Bob's system, and my account began the process to be cancelled for nonpayment.
Fast forward again to July 2nd. I get a notice from the tax commissioner that my vehicles are uninsured, and if I don't get it fixed I'll have the registration revoked on all my vehicles.
Surely this was a mistake, right? So I call Bob's office on the 5th of July and speak to a girl named Amanda (who no longer works for Bob Ward) and ask about the notice. Amanda tells me that she's with another customer, but she'll look into it and get it handled, and if there are any problems she would let me know.
Keep in mind that at this point, there hasn't been a payment made on my account since March.
Fast forward again to August.
I let a friend of mine drive my car, and he gets pulled over. Because my car doesn't have insurance, it gets towed and impounded. Did I mention it's after midnight?
Not understanding what happened, I call the after hours line for State Farm, and they confirm my fear: my insurance actually did lapse and I now have a big mess to sort through. So I buy an emergency policy from State Farm at more than double my previous monthly rate, and start unraveling the knot I find myself in.
On Friday morning, I call Bob Ward's office and am told there isn't anything they can do, there never was an auto-pay form filled out and entered into their system. A nice woman named Destiny was the one I spoke with, and I have nothing but praise for how she handled me as an upset customer.
So I cool off, print out the email I sent in with the form attached, grab my cell phone statements that show sent and received calls on relevant dates, and gather all of this up and head down to talk to Bob personally to see if anything can be done, including paying via certified funds all the missed premium payments.
And this is where things really take a turn.
Bob Ward was nothing short of insulting and unhelpful. He refused to review the documentation I brought, insulted my intelligence, and told me more or less to deal with it. I'll never forget how he said that I'm "a big boy now", and "this is a big boy lesson", and "[He's] not going to be intimidated by [my] paperwork", and that I "knew my insurance wasn't getting paid".
Well, after that interaction I took my documentation to State Farm's corporate complaint line, and in under a week State Farm reviewed my case and agreed to reinstate my policy and cover the lapse.
All in all, this is a giant mess that can be summed up as a clerical error. Things happen, and life
