Asurion Insurance Experience

In all the years (14 plus) that I have owned a cell phone or cell phones, this is the first time that I have had to replace a phone through an insurance claim.  I only have insurance on two of the four phones that are on my account, but I selected these two due to high cost of replacing one and the high risk of damage to the other.  The phone with high risk of being damaged was indeed the phone that needed to be replaced.  It it the phone that is in the possession of my daughter and it was damaged fairly early into the contract.  Replacing the phone without insurance would have cost a bundle, but with the Asurion coverage it was only $50.

I have to say that I was pleased with the experience.  I used Asurion’s online claim system to file my claim, which was approved quickly.  The phone was shipped by Asurion that day, although their choice of DHL should be reconsidered in my opinion (see earlier posts about DHL).

When the phone arrived, I simply followed the directions in the box for activating the phone and the phone was up and running.  The total amount of time that I invested into this phone replacement was about 20 minutes total.  I have no complaints about the service that I received from Asurion.

I will comment about insurance for cell phones.  Before you purchase this service you should investigate how much it is going to cost you to replace your cell phone.  On the Verizon system, the cost of the insurance is $5 per month or $60 per year.  Replacing the phone will cost you $50.  So if you break the phone on the 12th month of your contract, your total cost would be $110.  Generally, this is cheaper than replacing the phone by purchasing a new one.  Also keep in mind that once you reach the time at which you can do an upgrade, it is definitely not in your best interest to keep the insurance, because you can get a free or greatly reduced cost replacement directly from Verizon in this case.

Creative Customer

Yesterday, we had a customer that came into the store to tell us that she had lost two movies she had rented seven days ago.  She wanted to know how mush the fee would be.  We looked at her and told her that what she really wanted to know was what the replacement costs were for the movies that were now gone.  This is when she decided that she was smarted than us and told us that there was an new “Federal Law” stating that we could only charge her the cost of the movie new.  So $20.  Well we politely told her that she was mistaken and that we could in fact charge her more than $20.  Nice try!

I have to assume that she was perverting the lawsuit against Blockbuster Video.  That case really had nothing to do with late fees, rather the practice of converting a rental to a sale.  People complained that it was deceptive.  Well we have no such policy.  But, we do have a policy on late fees and the replacement of lost/stolen videos.