‘Hard to cancel’: Wild Medibank exchange

An irate customer has revealed the “ridiculous stonewalling” she was subject to in order to cancel a policy with health insurance giant Medibank.

The customer, Annie*, first contacted Medibank via its chat function on December 30, to ask to cancel her private health insurance due to what she describes as “terrible customer service”.

In screenshots of the conversation, shared with news.com.au, Annie wrote: “Every time I have to contact Medibank with an issue, it never gets resolved on the spot.

“The chat service is atrocious, with long wait times and agents seemingly juggling multiple chats at once.”

Five minutes later she received a response from a Medibank agent: “Our service here today is a messaging service and not live-chat”.

The agent explains that while she can’t cancel the policy via messages, she can send the request to the relevant team to process.

Upon confirmation that the agent has done this, and will be contacted within five business days, Annie asked for a reference number, and specified that she didn’t want to be contacted by Medibank’s customer retention team.

The agent replied: “I have put a copy of your request not to be contacted and for the policy to be closed”.

After Annie’s* chat with a customer service agent she believed the cancellation would be processed.

After not hearing anything from Medibank, Annie contacted the private health provider via live chat on January 10, to check that the cancellation had occurred ahead of her monthly direct debit, which was due the following day.

In this instance, the agent asks her why she wants to cancel her cover.

Annie again explains her reason for wanting to cancel is due to “terrible customer service”, and especially the need to follow up each time she has an issue.

She adds: “The fact that I need to contact you now and ask for confirmation of the cancellation is proof of that.”

This time she is told that in order to cancel, she will need to be called by an agent in the next two to three business days.

“This is ridiculous,” Annie wrote. “I specifically asked that your retention team NOT call me.”

When Annie threatens to take her complaint to the ombudsman, the agent replies: “Sorry but in this case, while Medibank does encourage our members to refer their complaints to the ombudsman if they are unsatisfied with the outcome, we would like the opportunity to deal with this as a formal complaint on an internal basis first.”

Annie responds: “Just CANCEL my policies! Why is that hard for you to understand?”

To this, the Medibank agent writes: “In order for us to cancel your policy we need to endorse this to our consultant’s team to assess this first and this is our normal process of cancellation [SIC],” insisting that a phone call is required.

Annie then points out to the agent the inconsistencies between the information given to her during this live chat and that provided by the previous live chat agent on December 30.

Annie concludes the chat by pointing out that Medibank’s “internal processes and systems are for you to manage”.

“You can’t use that as an excuse to deny your customer’s request to cancel.”

In her second chat interaction regarding the cancellation, Annie is informed a phone call will be necessary to action her request.

Following the chat, Annie told news.com.au that she has since called Medibank and believes that her policy has now been cancelled, and has joined a rival private health insurer.

“They make it very easy to sign up but hard to cancel,” she told news.com.au, labelling the interactions “ridiculous stonewalling”.

A spokesperson for Medibank told news.com.au: “We’re sorry for the delay in cancelling the customer’s policy.

“This was a case of human error which can happen from time to time.

“This is not the experience we want for our customers.

“When a customer contacts us to cancel their policy, we have processes in place to ensure it is done in a timely manner.”

The spokesperson added: “When the customer contacted us last week about the delay we cancelled the policy and backdated it to the original date that was requested.

“We also reimbursed the January premium so that the customer was not out of pocket.”

According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), unreasonable barriers to the cancellation of contracts or subscriptions can raise concerns under Australian Consumer Law.Businesses must clearly disclose to consumers upfront any key terms within their contracts, such as those relating to cancellation.

SOURCE: NEWS.COM