Don't forget to send your insurance forms in

Everyone is really busy these days and my clients especially. They tend to be high net worth individuals, company directors, senior clinicians and so forth. This means that they always have a lot going on and filling in forms and remembering to send them back to me isn't always their top priority.

Obviously as advising on medical insurance is my living I have a different priority which is to chase those clients who need to let me have their forms back regularly so as to ensure they don't forget. I have a pretty robust diary system and generally chase clients once every week or two until they eventually come back to me. However it is not unheard of for people to forget altogether and I of course can only chase for so long.

Please remember then that (and I know it sounds as if I'm stating the obvious here) if you don't send the form back you won't have cover in place. It is not unheard of for me to chase a client over and over again for a form. Eventually give up, tell the client I have filed the papers and then at some point in time get a call from them wanting to make a claim but they can't seem to find their insurance membership information - this doesn't happen often but I've had it several times over the years and as you might imagine it can be difficult conversation, especially given I'm essentially having to confirm that not only can they not claim but that they're also a bit of a poor administrator into the process !

I've written about this issue before here and mentioned it several times on my podcast (click here for information or to listen). 

I raise the issue here on the blog (again) because I have a prospective client who first contacted me for a new medical insurance report and overview in March 2014 and since then I have written three reports for him, re-priced the cover at least five times and e-mailed him at least 50 times in total (plus had several telephone conversations) and am still to receive the completed application forms back and I just know that this gentleman is one of the very busy but slightly disorganised people who might think he's done it and sent it on to me whereas in fact the form is sat completed in a pile on his desk.

I've just sent him a reminder e-mail - hopefully he might read and respond to this one.

So please, clients don't ignore my e-mails !