Along with finding out the final “discount” … which worked out to a total of $117 per 6 months, I also got my new renewal policy. That discount sounds pretty awesome when you consider that just over a year ago I was paying $900 every 6 months. Then came my “initial” Snapshot discount in May. I was down to $813 per 6 months.

So after my new $117 discount, you’d think I’d be even lower than that, right? Nope… went up $45 to $858 for a 6 month premium. So even though I saved a total of $234 per year thanks to my Snapshot data, my policy actually increased $324 in that same period for no apparent reason. What. The. Fuck?

Of course I took to the Twitterverse to  express my frustration and was met with the expected reply from Progressive:

We’re always here to help review your policy w/ you to see where we might save you $$ on your policy. Plz call us at… blah blah blah

OK, that’s awesome. So a year ago, after being a customer for 6 years previously, my policy was getting out of control and I had to call to get a “new policy” and save some money. That’s fine. And now barely 18 months later I’m being told to do the same exact thing again?!

As I replied on Twitter, this is NOT something I should have to do on a regular basis to keep an acceptable premium price. Once… OK, that’s fine. But just over a year later doing it again? That’s messed up.

Someone is getting a phone call alright… but it’s going to be to get some fucking answers. This is not how you keep your customers happy.

Some companies don’t get it.

When I was out running some errands and grabbing some lunch today, I was reminded of a few of those companies in the latter group. The first example being Bed Bath & Beyond.

I noticed they had a foursquare special running. Curious, since I occasionally do find my self browsing their store, I decided to see what it was. This is what it says:

Receive up to $120 towards your new Dyson vacuum and make the switch to Dyson Patented technology. Ask an associate for details.

Hmm… OK. At first glance, a $120 savings on anything is quite significant. And it may actually end up being a great deal. But here’s why I don’t think it works (for foursquare)… If I see a special on foursquare, I just want to be able to redeem it and go. I don’t want anything else to have to do. Buy my stuff, show the discount to the cashier and leave.

Now, admittedly I have not gone into the store to “ask an associate for details.” But that’s kind of the point… if I’m going to redeem a foursquare special on something, I shouldn’t have to! The other thing to consider is that it does absolutely nothing to  build repeat business or loyalty – but then again, not all specials do that to begin with. With this particular example, it’s just kind of icing on the cake for my example.

My second example was going to be Bath & Body Works… but looking up their venue now, they don’t seem to be running their special anymore. Previously it was a special to buy 2 things get 1 free (iirc, anyway)… and the thing that got me was that it said “no coupon code required” or something to that effect. And that tells me that it wasn’t so much a “fourquare special” as it was just advertising. No loyalty mechanism, no rewarding users for using fourquare to check out their store, nothing. Just a normal sale that any random person could get, foursquare or no foursquare. Why bother? Other than just using it for advertising?

One last point on Bed Bath & Beyond is that I went to Twitter to post about my thoughts on their “special” … but they don’t seem to even have an official account. How is that possible? There is some account with the BB&B name, but it’s some store “advocate” or something. What a waste of an opportunity to communicate with your customers…

If you recall, the initial discount was 7% for me and 13% for Jen – which saved us about $15/mo (or $174 per year). After another 2-3 weeks our discounts are both going up! Jen is up to 16% discount and I’m up to double digits at 10%. At that rate, we would save about $20/mo (or about $230 per year) over the original rate! That is, unless my math is wrong… which it might be.

We’ll obviously find out more when my renewal comes due again – which should be around the first of August.

At this point, I can say that I’m slightly less worried about the “hard brakes per 100 miles” portion, but I still don’t know what to think of the number. At this moment, my weekly averages look like this:

• High Risk Driving Time: 0 hours
• Miles Driven: 190 miles
• Hard Brakes per 100 Miles: 14.58

So, is that good? Honestly the “miles driven” part is probably a bit misleading. I don’t normally drive that much. We had an unplanned trip to Rochester last weekend (100 miles one way) so that is likely throwing the average a bit out of whack. I also had a really bad day of hard brakes the other day.

I had to pick up a package at UPS but the truck wasn’t back yet. So I went back a little later when they expected the truck would be back. It wasn’t. One of the guys called the truck and he was apparently running really far behind. They got the street that he was on and I was going to try to meet him and just pick up my package that way. It wasn’t far (maybe 2 miles).

Problem was that this street has a ton of stop signs and is a very residential area. So while I wasn’t speeding around like some asshole (seriously, there were kids everywhere – I’m not an idiot), I was stopping at all of these stop signs and looking around for this truck. I’m sure that my hard brakes number was also not helped by my frustrations of not even finding the truck. So by the time I left that neighborhood and headed home, I was probably quite annoyed. That doesn’t translate very well to slow, calm, casual braking.

Then again, that’s why they look at the averages I guess. Hopefully it’ll sort itself out in the next 11 days and won’t look so awful when they go to review the data. Who knows.

Jen’s data is actually a bit more consistent. She probably drive’s a bit less than I do (we take my car more often) and typically only has 1 or 2 hard brakes per day… if that. This is good. And honestly, her car is really the initial reason I signed up for the Snapshot thing in the first place. I know it doesn’t get used very often (just barely broke 16k miles after 2 years) and she doesn’t drive like a mad (wo)man or anything either. Somehow though, her car needs 2 more days of data than mine does before it’ll be ready.

Can’t wait to save some money.

No idea what I’m talking about? Super simple version: It is a small device that connects to your car’s diagnostic port (any vehicle after 1996 is required to have one). It tracks 3 driving characteristics: time of driving, total miles, and “hard brakes.” It does not contain GPS of any kind and has no idea where you are. It also does not track any information related to exceeding the speed limit (so they’re not going to turn around and say “it looks like you speed a lot and that’s unsafe”). That’s it. So plug this little guy in and you can end up saving up to 30% on your premium. And worst case, your premium will not increase because of this device. So what is there to lose?

Let’s take a look at those 3 factors though… time of driving. Basically any time between 12am and 4am is a really high risk time. So if you end up driving often within that time frame, that’s not good. We are typically never out at that time of night. I would say maybe once a month or less – and even then, we’re probably on our way home at 12am.

The total miles driven. This one is kind of obvious – if you drive less, your risk is less. We both have very short commutes. Hers is less than 4 miles round trip and mine is less than 6 miles round trip to work. Outside of that, it’s about 12 miles to the mall or anywhere else we would go. To put our driving in perspective, her car is just barely 2 yrs old and just very recently passed 15k miles. That’s not a lot.

The 3rd factor is the more interesting one. They track the number of “hard brakes” you make. And thankfully they do provide a definition of this… it is a decrease in speed of 7mph per second or greater. That doesn’t sound too bad – but turns out it’s kind of hard to gauge. It is really the one factor I’m concerned with.

Even with me being fairly cautious for the last 3 days, I’ve apparently had 6 hard braking instances in just 38 miles. I’ve been trying to pay attention to my braking and all, but apparently not enough – or my guess of deceleration is a bit off. Believe it or not, the whole 7mph per second thing is pretty hard to estimate.

The initial data for my WRX, last 3 days.

The question becomes, how much of a factor is that? And do they take other factors into account when looking at it? According to their Twitter account, they do to some degree. So that’s good. I look at it this way, if you drive a lot of highway miles commuting, you’re probably going to have a much lower “hard brakes per 100 miles” number. But I drive much more in the city than the highway, so with more stop and go traffic, it is very likely my number might end up higher than I would like it to. But again, I’m hoping some of that data is taken into account.

We’re still a month away from knowing whether or not we’ll save anything from this – but I’m expecting we will. Neither of us drive a whole lot and it is almost exclusively during the day. So even if we don’t get that full 30%, even 10% or 20% would be nice. Our 6 month premium is about $900 for both cars and both drivers with full coverage. A 30% savings of that would knock off almost $300 and could save us $45 per month! That’s pretty significant.

In the end, there’s no real downside to trying this program out. It can’t really get much worse… and I’m honestly expecting SOME level of discount, regardless of the number of hard braking instances. Just have to wait a while to see what that will be.

So in a minor bid to change that a little, here is a little positive feedback in terms of “word of mouth.”

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that I recently had to deal with Progressive with regard to my insurance policy continuing to skyrocket (up to $1028 for 6 months if I renewed straight up – for 2 cars, 2 clean drivers – crazy). After an ordeal of calling up and essentially “complaining” about my policy continuing to climb, they worked with me to start essentially a new policy with all of the same info – which saved me something like $240/six months. And even beyond that – the payments are now every month (instead of 5 on and 1 off) so that’s spread out further, thus making the payment even lower. Suffice to say I’m going from what would have been about $212/mo to $130/mo.

Anyway… after the new policy started and I made the first deposit payment, my online policy kept reminding me to submit proof of my security system and such for the discount. Uh whaaa? The guy that setup my new policy assured me everything would transfer and I’d be good to go.

Well I emailed Progressive again and basically said “I was told this… and it says this.” That was last night.

Got a reply this morning confirming that I’m set. Nothing to mail/fax in or prove. The policy is ready to go and I’m all done with having to fight for a lower rate (for now).

So nothing big. But it’s nice to contact someone about something you think is a problem and then are assured that it is actually OK in the end and you don’t have to worry about it. So thank you, Progressive. You are still showing me that you’d like to keep my business (even though I had to essentially call and ask if you still wanted it after you kept jacking my rates up).