Here’s my experience on buying a Term Plan for Life Insurance from ICICI Prudential. I’ve tried to be as factual as possible and to keep the emotion out, though I came close to losing my patience with them ever so often.

I approached them, towards the end of February, for a Term Plan. I’d done my research on the net and determined that one of their products - PureProtect Elite - offered the lowest premium for comparable products from other companies. Having confirmed this with the Executive, I agreed to go in for the product. As part of the application, they required me to submit a proof of ID (understandable) and proof of income (completely ununderstandable). I tried asking about the latter, as I couldn’t understand why buying an Insurance policy would require proof of income. I wasn’t asking for a loan, and the policy would clearly lapse if I didn’t pay the premium. The back office guys couldn’t give any rational explanation (obviously!) but rather rudely told me that they couldn’t sell insurance to ’anyone on the street’, when I asked what if a jobless person wanted to get his life insured. Anyways, rather than argue, I provided the required documents to initiate the application.

Then, the fun began.

A medical test was required, and the same was setup quite promptly at a nearby hospital. During the purchase of the policy, the Advisor had informally told me a few tests that would be required, including, he said, an ECG. On the day of the test, I promptly landed up at the Hospital at the appointed hour. There, I was given a paper with a list of tests, which didn’t include ECG, but instead had an Echo Cardiogram. Thinking that things might have changed, I went ahead and got the tests done.

After a couple of follow-ups (always had to follow-up, there was no proactive information sharing from their side), the Advisor advised me that there had been a mistake in the initial tests, and that an ECG should have been done, not an Echo. He blamed it completely on the Hospital (of course, I can’t say whether that’s true) and promised to see what he could do, even though I told him I was ready to go and get the ECG done. A few days later, he predictably called and said I’d have to go to the hospital to get the ECG done. By this time it was more than 2 weeks since my application.

In the interests of time, I went again and got the ECG done. One more follow-up and this time the