When added value subtracts
There was I feeling pleased with myself having found new buildings and contents cover at an attractive premium and with free Home Emergency Cover thrown in. That feeling of making a smart purchase is great, and I even found myself talking it up to a couple of friends.
How quickly the added value effect can evaporate when it all goes wrong. Just two months in the new house and a frantic call from my wife about water cascading from the hot water tank in the bathroom into my study below, gives the Barclays Helpline its first test. Frontline claims handling went well and the promised call from the outsourced emergency plumbing service came within the hour. This looks promising I thought. The engineer arrived and after an hour announced he had isolated the offending hot water tank but wasn’t qualified to finish repairing a pressurised system. Not good. Why didn’t anyone ask what type of system I had? Then things went downhill from there. A night without heating. A cold shower that nearly prompted a cardiac arrest. A long wait for engineer no. 2 to arrive next day to stay 5 minutes and conclude he needed to order a part. Then silence for hours followed by one of the rudest call centre agents who told me I’d have to wait another week for the part to be approved, ordered, delivered then installed. My protesting of how was one to keep a young child and two adults warm and clean for a week without hot water, was met with ‘boil a kettle’. His reply made my blood boil.
Time to act. A couple of calls later and I traced the heating engineer who originally fitted the heating system for the previous owner. Half an hour later he was round and one hour later the hot water and heating were fully working again. I can’t say enough how pleased I was with Mr Terry Coles of Yaxley. I can easily express how disappointed I have been with my added value emergency cover from Barclays. Now I’m talking them down.
