Santam Insurance good and proper. DEFINITELY NOT!

“At the beginning of January, we experienced the trauma of having the privacy of our home invaded by ******* in the night whilst we were fast asleep. Little did we realise that our dealings with our insurer - Santam would subject us to even more stress. Santam have disappointingly undermined their own slogan - Insurance Good and Proper, as there has been little that can be considered good and proper with regards our claim experience. In effect Santam made us feel as though we were the *******. Santam’s claims assessor requested that we provide proof of ownership for all the items ******, which we had offered to do (to give a full listing of items plus proof thereof) when initially taking out the insurance policy. But at that stage Santam’s intermediaries told us that we didn’t need to do so as we were insuring the “contents” as a whole for a lump sum amount. We had no way of knowing that at claim stage this story would be very different. Santam’s claims assessor even interrogated us on why the police (SAPS) had not taken fingerprints etc. I told her she was welcome to contact the police directly to ask them any questions that she may need answers to, as we were certainly not in the frame of mind of dictating to the police how they should do their job. She kept on quoting the law, about companies having to keep stuff on their records for five years and that they have to give proof etc, expecting us to obtain copies of the purchase invoices. We sent proof by providing pictures of boxes of the items that was ****** and pictures of the actual items, where we didn’t have boxes for these items. We were told that this would suffice. Later we were told that Santam’s claim moderator had requested the model number for the cellphone, as the IMEI blacklisting confirmation from Vodacom was invalid. On the same day we sent pictures of the phone box with IMEI number of the phone. We kept querying the reason for the delay in finalising our claim and was eventually told that due to “a lack of proof of ownership”, in which the full make / model of items could not be confirmed Santam could only offer to replace the items with entry level pricing items and that the cash that was ****** was not covered as it was only a ******* and not an armed *******. The claims assessor we discovered had incorrectly recorded the ****** TV as a 55” UHD TV and not as Samsung 65” UHD TV in spite of the fact that we had sent her a picture of the box. In Santam’s letter of offer to settle the claim, single items were offered to be replaced when multiple items had been taken. For example, Santam offered to replace 1 X HP Laptop, instead of 3 that were ****** and 1 X Rayban sunglasses when 4 were ******. All this information had been captured on the assessors recording of our conversation, so it begs questioning how this information was incorrectly recorded in Santam’s settlement offer. Having jumped through the many hoops imposed to substantiate our claim which amounted to a sum in the order of R150k, a month later (yesterday), Santam offered R25k to settle our claim, a staggering shortfall of R113k. Now we feel as though we have been ****** for a second time. We reject Santam’s settlement offer and hope that Santam will do the right thing and review the extremely poor treatment that we have received at the hands of their claims assessment department.”