Swinton spam, Its-not-4me

George and I spend a fair amount of our time going through the online insurance quote forms and call centres. It gives us an understanding of the IT systems and techniques being used by everyone in the market. It’s not an exciting part of anyone’s job and it is certainly not one you talk to your mates about at the pub. But you need to keep tabs on your competition.

When trawling around like this, we obviously don’t leave our real contact details each time – for fear of being spammed. There’s one poor street of unsuspecting homeowners who must be getting mounds of insurance spam landing on their doorstep! However, every now and again, we need to leave some real data to see how and when people outbound and spam you. This is generally not a problem until it comes to the spam merchants of Swinton!

Completely out of the blue, they’ve managed to call and email me more than five times in a single day. That’s not so much customer relationship management but more like stalking. Maybe even harassment. How can they expect to generate trust and develop the long term engagement of customers interacting with their brand if they’re badgering people from the outset.

Regardless of their lack of principles, one would imagine that by using the Swinton unsubscribe feature, you would be safe from all future spam and bombardments. Apparently not! A few weeks following the initial onslaught, the same thing happened again – having actively unsubscribed and asked for all details to be removed from their spam system.

CRM managers out there, take note. Don’t fall short of this most basic of principles. If you’re selling door-to-door, what do you do if someone slams the door in your face? Do you ring the bell again and start your patter all over again, clipboard at the ready with the same beaming smile on your face? No, you move on to the next house and hope that the same thing doesn’t happen again. Simply don’t communicate with people once they’ve already asked you not to. It’s that simple.

Unfortunately, Swinton are not the only one’s doing this. Quote Line Direct also appear to randomly get in touch with you to see if you’ve changed your mind and are ready to listen to their drivel. It doesn’t matter how many times you say no, they still come back for more. Incidentally, special mention should go out to Endsleigh here. Despite picking up the phone and hearing the words, “Can I speak to Mickey Mouse please?” (someone must have quick auto-diallers in their call centre) they do appear to correctly adhere to the basic meaning of an unsubscribe function.

So you see Swinton, your spam…its-not-4me. Has anyone else had problems with people spamming them? Do you think the insurance industry is any better or worse than other sectors in the UK? Is there any incentive whatsoever for companies to adhere to the data privacy guidelines?