We are an internet and telesales business insurance broker, this means that we never get to meet any of our customers. Call centres have been around for years and it is now a fact of life that you can purchase most services and many products this way.
There is a difficulty for us though, in that we have to try even harder to get a customer to accept our services because we do not have that face to face contact. We are usually competing against other brokers, because people will rightly get quotes from more than one company.
If we gove someone a business insurance quote, which is better than there existing renewal, the holding broker goes into panic alert. They realise too late that they have maybe been complacent and have to do something to keep the business. One of these steps they will take is to try to put seeds of doubt in the customers mind about how good we really are.
The question you may be asking is, how do I know that the company that have provided me with a quote are any good? You need not worry. It used to be, pre 2005, that anyone could start up as an insurance intermediary. As long as they had agencies with insurers they could effectively do what they liked. Not that this caused any real problems, it just meant that there was no overall central control of brokers.
Then in 2005, along came the Financial Services Authority and they had to authorise and regulate every single insurance broking company in the country. If you did not, or do not have, an FSA registration number then you cannot trade. It is as simple as that. So when these competing brokers try to sow the seeds, they are really barking up the wrong tree and it is just the panic setting it that they have lost another customer to the net.
Just ask your broker what their registration number is and you can check on the FSA website whether there have ever been any disciplinary problems in the past. The likelihood is that there have never been any issues and you can quite happily carry on and dealing with a company that will offer you a better price for similar or better cover.