TD Insurance: Meh.

In contrast to Apple’s surprise & delight approach to customer service, we have TD Insurance.

I just recently bought a Toyota Yaris and one of the point-of-purchase options is to get security engraving, which for me provides little peace-of-mind but does provide a ~$250 discount on car insurance over 5 years. So we signed up for that.

However, it turns out that the engraving service that our dealer uses is not on the approved list on the TD side, so that was just money thrown out the freshly engraved window as far as I’m concerned. Now a helpful TD chap sympathized with the misstep, and said he’d try to get us the discount at least for year 1 (about ~$40) just to make us feel better. As for the discount over subsequent years, we would have to consider re-engraving with an approved vendor.

Nice gesture… bordering on surprise and delight. Given that the company in question is an insurance company, I’ll at least give them surprise.

Well, said helpful TD chap called back today. Unfortunately, he sincerely lamented, his request to do this nice thing for us was kiboshed by an ‘analyst’ who scoured the paperwork and determined that we were told of our engraving vendor’s ineligibility prior to having actually had the car engraved. Because of this, the nice gesture had to be withdrawn. Ixnay on the enerosityjay. Never mind the fact that this window-of-opportunity occurred outside business hours. OK, so we may have had an opportunity to place phone calls and cause a dramatic scene just as the would-be engraver approached our vehicle with his… well with whatever it is one engraves with.

The only bone I was thrown was that if I had the forensic wherewithal to re-construct the scene and demonstrate a timetable that proved that the damage indeed had already effectively been done… that I could submit it to the analyst for reconsideration.

Meh.

This started out as an unsolicited nice gesture, and a minor one at that, but one that resonated pretty well for me given that it’s source was a frickin’ insurance company. Sadly, a soulless pencil-pushing analyst (perhaps a thoroughly decent person outside business hours) determined that it didn’t add up, and reversed the goodwill that had otherwise been generated at low cost.