Warning! Avoid Everquote.com
We’d all like a deal, right? Most especially a better deal on something that you have to buy anyway, like car insurance. So it was that a couple of weeks ago I succumb to an online ad for EverQuote, a company that purports itself as disrupting the insurance business. I regret the decision to try the service. It was a moment of weakness that haunts me still.
We’ve been with the same company for auto insurance for a long time. They are not the company that has our household insurance. I had thought that it would be worth the time, on a Saturday morning, to see if this disruptive young startup could provide me with a couple of quotes. My hope was that, with just a few minutes at the keyboard (actually my phone in this case) I’d have some insight as to whether we were paying too much.
It didn’t work out that way.
You see, it takes a couple of minutes to tap all the requisite info into the company’s web site. It’s not difficult. They require, amongst other things, your email address and phone number.
Picture me having coffee on a Saturday morning, casually tapping on my Pixel. Before I had finished completing the requested info online. Before I had received an email acknowledgement from the. My phone started to ring. I had four calls from insurance agents within minutes! Even before I had put my phone down.
I felt like a soldier in the trenches who had made the mistake of taking a peek out across no-man’s-land. All of a sudden there was cannon-fire! I was literally under siege.
The experience for the poor call center agents must have been terrible as well. I answered their many calls with the same defensive posture, trending toward angry as they kept calling. And calling.
They were trying to “help” me when I’d not yet had any opportunity to examine any info about the matter of the inquiry. I definitely didn’t want to talk to anyone. I wanted to read a couple of quotes, on my own terms.
When the email did start to come, it was a torrent as well. Not lengthy, certainly with no details attached. Just something to entice me to click to get to the promised information.
Still annoyed, for a couple of weeks I simply ignored these messages. Today, I once again succumb and clicked on one. It took me to a page where was I was again supposed to put enter some info. I didn’t. Even so, an agent called me about 10 minutes later.
This is positively predatory. Not unlike wandering onto a used car lot. The sales staff falls upon the unsuspecting like vultures on road kill. This is no way to do business.
I visit the EverQuote web site to see if there was some way to give this feedback to the company. There’s a simple form on the Contact page. No direct email contact offered except for press. There’s a toll-free number, but I don’t want to talk to them anymore.
So I’m writing this for publication here, then I’ll send them a link. These guy present themselves as being smart. Maybe they are. But the aggressive manner of their approach I find to be deeply offensive.
P.S. – Normally I would include a logo. I don’t like to post anything without some graphics support. In this case, I don’t want to give the company something to complain about.