I see that it has been about a year since the last NetQuote Rippoff review and nothing has changed. For the record, I am a long time independent insurance agent with over 32 years of experience. I started as a one man shop in 1987 but grew my agency over 20 years to be a very large and successful with 12 office locations and 140 employees that I sold several years ago. Unlike most insurance agents, I spent money to make money when it comes to advertising and making the phone ring. Therefore I’m not a penny pincher if something works. I quickly became board with my “retirement” after selling my large operation and opened up a local agency to give me something to do. Although I had read the bad reviews about NetQuote leads, I reluctantly tried it because a few agents I know said the h*o leads were “okay” some of the time. NetQuote had a promo going with leads at half price through the end of the year. My first red flag after I signed up was that they charged me full price out of the gate until I called them to remind them of their own half price promo. After approximately 1 month and spending over $1,000 on the Preferred Auto and h*o leads, I can tell you that NONE were any good. That is correct, not one lead was of any value and not one sale was ever completed from these lousy leads. Now NetQuote will tell you the key to making the sale is getting back to the person as soon as you get the lead. That advice is actually the precursor for blaming you for the zero results and not the quality of the lead itself. You see, “you’re just not fast enough”. Oh yeah? I can tell you that we jumped on every lead within seconds if we received it when we were awake and in the office. I say “awake and in the office” because the timing of many leads were a joke. We received many of our leads anywhere from 3:00AM to 6:00AM when an instantaneous response call from us was impossible. But when we could immediately call a customer many said, “Oh I already talked to St Farm”. Talked to St Farm?!?! How could you have talked to St Farm and hung up the phone when I just got your lead two seconds ago? It certainly isn’t the customer’s fault. Could it be that the lead was in fact not fresh and just a regurgitated one being bled dry for its fee potential by NetQuote? “I already talked to St Farm” was only some of the results we encountered. There were many, many leads with bogus info. But the kicker was that the majority said they never asked for a quote or could not remember filling out a quote request. How could you not remember filling out a quote request when NetQuote is telling me you just did it a few seconds ago and that speed is everything? Others said that they had been inundated with calls from other agents and therefore not thrilled to hear from us. How could these people be “inundated” with calls from agents when NetQuote tells me I’m just one of a few agents who gets the lead from a specific zip code? When asked, NetQuote’s response was, “they can lie to you”. Having NetQuote accusing the leads as possible liars is somewhat like the pot calling the kettle black. So much for lead freshness and quality. We also received leads that contained info for people who had died, not recently but up to a year ago. We were also the lucky recipient of a lead from Canada. NetQuote could have caught that one by the phone number. But apparently it was our job to catch it after we had been charged. We had one lead allegedly from a woman in our town (Eastern Time Zone) who was so upset that we had her info that she called her husband on a business trip in California. He called us directly at 9:00AM our time/6:00AM his time demanding the name of someone he could talk to about how their information was obtained. I told him that we were trying out NetQuote and were equally upset about the bogus acquisition of people’s personal information. He turned out to be a nice guy once I explained that we were unwitting victims of NetQuote’s practices as well. I gave him NetQuote’s phone number and wished him luck. I called NetQuote on numerous occasions to explain what we were encountering and to question the lead quality. No explanation from NetQuote provided any clarity for our dilemma. They did confess that they buy leads from other sources (partners) who may obtain a person’s info that thinks they are entering a free drawing. Gee, I can open up a phone book and get leads of that quality for free by cold calling. NetQuote also stated that their lead “partners” may provide lesser quality leads then the ones they supposedly generate but that they monitor it to minimize the bad ones. Judging from our experience, quality control is non-existent. But why bother with quality when NetQuote apparently does just fine selling anything as a lead to agents hanging onto the hope that one might actually be a good one.
Insurance regulations are heavy handed when it comes to agents misrepresenting or concealing material facts. Funny how a racket like NetQuote does not operate by the same standards that we have to live by. Needless to say, NetQuote has been fired from this agency for those very reasons. Buyer beware to those agents considering NetQuote. The facts speak for themselves.
P.S. Those positive NetQuote reviews that show up on other websites are suspicious at best when you aren’t allowed to post your own experience. My guess is that it’s just a damage control website owned by NetQuote to counter the bad reviews that are the truth. Clever people aren’t they?