- Motor insurers offer aggressive sales, providing poor post-sales service.
- Service tickets close unresolved, helplines unreachable, add-on claims problematic.
- Claims process suffers significant delays, poor communication, and reduced payouts.
The phone never stops ringing when an insurance company wants your business. Agents call, executives follow up, and polished pitches arrive with glowing promises. Sign the policy, though, and a curious thing happens: you stop existing.
That shift from attentive to absent is not a coincidence. It is, many policyholders would argue, the defining character of India’s motor insurance industry. The sales machinery operates at full throttle. Post-sales service, far too often, runs on silence. Calls go unanswered. Emails disappear. Service requests get marked as resolved before the problem is even looked at.
This is not a fringe complaint. The frustration is widespread and growing, and it cuts across segments, vehicle types and insurer categories.
A System Built To Avoid Its Customers
The pattern is consistent. A policyholder raises a query or initiates a claim. A service ticket is opened with assurances that the “concerned team is working on it.” The ticket closes within 24 hours. The problem remains untouched. The cycle repeats.
Company helplines are frequently unreachable. Websites trap users in CAPTCHA loops that go nowhere. There is rarely a direct line to speak to anyone with authority to actually resolve an issue. The infrastructure, by design or neglect, insulates the insurer from the very customers it has sold a promise of protection to.
Add-ons such as tyre protection, engine cover and zero depreciation are aggressively marketed at the time of sale. When a claim is actually filed under one of these covers, a different set of rules quietly comes into play, partial approvals, depreciation deductions, and lengthy investigations into matters that could be resolved with a single phone call.
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The Claims Process: Where Promises Meet Fine Print
IRDAI, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India, prescribes clear turnaround timelines for motor insurance claims, measured in hours, not days or weeks. In practice, many claims drag on far longer, with surveyors taking days to submit reports and insurers taking additional time to respond once they do.
The surveyor visit, which should be a swift and professional assessment, often becomes a source of further delay. Garages wait on surveyors. Surveyors wait on insurers. Policyholders, sitting at the end of this chain, are left without their vehicles and without clear timelines. Communication during this period is typically poor, and the burden of follow-up falls entirely on the customer.
Partial approvals are another common pressure point. Depreciation clauses and wear-and-tear assessments are applied in ways that significantly reduce reimbursements, particularly on relatively new or lightly used vehicles. Policyholders who have paid for comprehensive cover frequently discover that the effective payout bears little resemblance to the coverage they believed they had purchased.
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What Policyholders Can Do
The regulatory framework does offer recourse, but using it requires policyholders to be proactive and informed. The first and most important step is to communicate in writing at every stage; email and WhatsApp messages create a documented trail that verbal conversations do not.
When following up on delayed claims, citing IRDAI’s prescribed turnaround timelines directly puts the insurer on notice that the customer is aware of their regulatory obligations. If the insurer does not respond within the stipulated period, the matter should be escalated to the insurer’s Grievance Redressal Officer, whose contact details are available on the company’s website and on the policy document itself.
If the grievance officer route yields no resolution, IRDAI’s Integrated Grievances Management Portal, known as IGMS, allows policyholders to file formal complaints with the regulator. Before buying or renewing any policy, the add-ons, exclusions and depreciation clauses deserve careful reading. The fine print is rarely where the sales pitch focuses. It is, however, where most disputes begin.
