Here’s a tricky situation – one that I had experienced on three occasions leading up to Christmas 2011.
I started LFC in 1988 and, inevitably, over 24 years one will build good relationships with certain clients and some will turn into friendships. Similarly, close friends will come to rely on you as their Broker… it all seems to go “hand in hand”.
Some people have the view that these friends/clients should be serviced by independent staff. The counter-argument to this is that your “friends” want to see “you” and may take offence at you passing their account to someone else. This is fine, but be extra vigilant and make sure you are always on the ball!
Let me give you three examples of where things can go wrong:
Firstly, a friend, who hopefully will also eventually become family, owns a business in the construction world. We arrange his Contractors, Office and Fleet Policy?. He has a dozen or so cars and vans on the Fleet and one of the cars was involved in a very minor incident for which no formal claim was made. What was a concern was that the Fleet had an “over 30’s” endorsement on two specific cars and one of these cars had been allocated by the owner to his daughter who was 27! The “friend/client” had received our summary of cover, the policy and the certificates, all absolutely clear on this, but someone hadn’t put two and two together, and so, if the incident had been serious, there would have been a problem. In this case, the finger was pointed at me as “you knew I’d given this car to my daughter”! I won’t bore you with the rest!!
The second incident was when I was away at Christmas in 2011. My children were “Facebooking” their friends and showed me some photographs of the daughter of one of our family “friends/clients”. This young lady was standing proudly in front of her car which was already insured on the Fleet we arranged…what she had been bought, was a personalised number plate which had been put on the car, but we hadn’t been told about! A couple of calls, a “sorry we forgot to tell you” and it was all sorted.
Lastly, this happened at about 11:30pm on 31st December. You can imagine, I’d had a few drinks and was at that “shouting” stage of inebriation! My very close friend started discussing his children’s University progress and that their middle child had just moved into a “house” with 3 of his fellow students. Of course, it only just sunk in that there was an insurance implication here and that I’d deal with it as soon as I was sober in the morning, but couldn’t absolutely confirm cover as Insurers doors don’t open until the 3rd! Luckily, I made a call to a helpful underwriter and it has been dealt with.
There isn’t really a moral to these stories, but my opinion is that, “friend” clients are good to have, but they need to be carefully monitored, and when the husband or wife tells you something that may seem insignificant, have a think about their insurance portfolio! How very sad!!!
