Mail-out madness as insurer offers refunds to customers in error

UK insurer Hastings Direct had a few technical issues this week after some of its customers were told they'd receive refunds, only to have their hopes dashed by a hasty apology.

That particular email was among a variety of messages sent to customers in error. On the face of things, it appears as though somebody has run a questionable query on the company's databases. On Reddit, users reported getting emails cheerfully informing them that their policy had been renewed when the renewal date was months away.

Others posted messages that looked like a query gone wrong or some decidedly dubious database entries. One shared the text of an email sent by the insurer: "Since you renewed your car insurance on, null, we've discovered an error. Unfortunately, you were charged a higher price than you should have been."

The poster continued: "I've never had car insurance with Hastings (only home)."

Hastings Direct is a poster child for digital transformation. Consultancy EY came up with a case study festooned with buzzwords. EY said: "Hastings Direct completed a migration to the cloud, further invested in data enrichment and management information throughout the organization and launched a core platform upgrade to further enable digital customer journeys."

The company is also great pals with Microsoft and has migrated a number of workloads to Azure over the years.

Simon Bullers, chief technology officer at Hastings Direct until 2023, said: "We had 753 major incidents in 2021. After our migration to Azure VMware Solution, we dropped by 90 percent to just 75 for all of 2022."

Microsoft said: "With its data in Azure, the company can now take advantage of Azure Machine Learning and other Azure services to take the insurance industry into the future."

Or accidentally set its call center on fire with excited customers hoping for a refund due to a mangled mail-out.

Hastings Direct is not sure how the mistake happened. A spokesperson told The Register that the email regarding a refund on an insurance policy, which went to several current and former customers, as well as customers of other brands and products, such as the company's take on telematics - YouDrive - was sent to most in error.

The message was swiftly followed by an apology for the confusion caused.

"Our customers are our priority and although we are still working through the specifics of how the error occurred, we know it was not a data breach or leak." ®