Aviva plc recently made a doozy of a customer service mistake, accidentally using the same name for several thousand of its customers.
The British multinational general and life insurer sent an email to legions of customers addressing all of them as “Michael,” BBC News and other media outlets reported.
As the article noted, Aviva apologized, blaming a “temporary technical error,” and the company said that the wrong name in the email greeting was the only error. Aviva added the error did not compromise any personal details and the rest of the customer service email contained correct content.
Ben Carey-Evans, an insurance analyst at GlobalData, said that the email error shouldn’t cause any long-term issues.
“Aviva has enough customer goodwill for this email error not to be an issue,” he said in prepared remarks. “This is clearly not ideal customer service and could even raise privacy concerns around whether it had sent further information to the wrong people – though Aviva has stated that this is not the case.”