Insurance companies are useful people when you’re careless enough to drop your mobile phone down the toilet! Yes a Tamebay reader (who shall remain anonymous unless they own up) did just that with their Samsung Galaxy S3.
Insurance is pretty straight forward, you claim, they promised a like for like policy, they pay up and you get replacement goods to replace the damaged ones.
However in this case the Insurance company didn’t bother to go out and buy a replacement, they didn’t send a cheque or credit the claimants bank account. They simply checked Amazon had Samsung Galaxy S3s in stock and sent an Amazon gift voucher to settle the claim.
It’s pretty impressive when insurance companies start using Amazon to replace insured goods. They even saved themselves some money as the price recently dropped on the S3 from £349.99 to £330.00 and that’s the value of the Amazon gift certificate they sent.
I don’t know if insurance companies have managed to negotiate a deal with Amazon to get a discount on vouchers, but if Amazon manage to get insurance companies to use them as a claims fulfilment service it’s a great trick. A customer gets a great experience and perhaps decides they’ll buy from Amazon again in the future.
Incidentally the insurance company also declined to have the faulty smartphone sent to them to try and repair it citing health and safety reasons 😀
