who is sick of getting hosed by vendor programs??

[steve g]

last night I get a call for a kitchen fire, I chose my words carefully and managed to set up an appointment for this morning (sat) I didn't say oh this should be covered by your insurance or anything, a couple hours later I get a call from the people canceling my appointment, what happened is they called to make a claim on their insurance and the claims office told them they needed to use their vendor. I barely talked the people into looking at it anyways telling them they had no obligation and a second opinion would not hurt etc, now I have gone from job in hand to probably no job, anyways I check it out and determine my profit would be about 8k, but I can kiss that goodbye, I can't tell you how many times this has happened, I have no problem with the insurance company recommending a vendor however if the customer has already called someone they should leave it alone.

I have even had farmers tell the customer right in front of me to have our company leave and that they would pay a service call to us. and to wait while service master comes. The claims office said they would not pay for the work if they had us do it, had a similar situation with an allied claim, on that one I told the customer if they refused to pay our bill, the job was free.

I am getting pretty fed up with the games that are played these days and have been taking every action I can to avoid it, however some are just unavoidable. some things I have done.

1) avoid talking about insurance coverage unless I am actually on the loss, I don't want them calling to file the claim until I have been on the loss.

2) get to the loss as fast as possible

3) get an authorization with seperate mitigation and repair clauses,

4) prep the customer for the onslaught by the insurance company, they will face it initially when they have us do the mitigation and also when the reparis are to be done, the classic thing is for the adjuster to weasel his guys in for the repairs

5) be on the job when the adjuster shows up, this prevents them from manipulating the customer, to use their people.

6) be roadwise and know which insurance companies will give you trouble with vendors, also it helps to know which adjusters will not mess you around.

7) of course build as good a relationship as possible with the customer

what else am I missing,

is it illegal for the insurance company to tell the customer they have to use the vendor or they will not pay the bill?? what if something like this was caught on recording??

 

[Chris Muetterties]

I always tell the owner that they can either have me an advocate for them with the same price structure as the other vendor

or

They can hire the preferred vendor that owes the insurance company for 3 million dollars of work per year.

 

[Desk Jockey]

It's a tough fight on an uneven playing field.

We figure we lose at least $250,000.00 a year on work that is diverted/forced anway from customers that would normally use us.

Not much we can do. We have a large fire we are working right now that Safeco tried to get the insured to use their vendor but was told by family, the builder and others we were the one to call.

We are still winning on the insured that are strong enough to fight for whom thay want, but those that fold easily go to the vendors.


We have one from last month from an affluent insured that used the vendor and realized they not all things are equal and mid way throught the packout pulled the plug on the vendor and switched to us midstream.

We also had one one that we looked at, had approval from the adjuster to do but the insured asked to have a second opinion had the vendor look at it and choose us becuse while we were much higher than the vendor our estimate was much more through and pointed out areas the vendor missed.

We are working on an something we can hand to the customer and put on the website that will inform the insured about what to look out for when dealing with vendor programs. When we finish it I'll send you a copy or you can copy it off our website.

Hang in there and keep fighting!

 

[steve g]

safeco does suck, last one I did for them the adjuster told me flat out we were not going to be doing the carpet replacement, even though the customer authorized us to. as you can imagine I don't like being treated this way, he forgot that I had yet to send my mitigation bill in. I am just a business that wants to be treated fairly, funny thing is when an adjuster threats me fairly it comes back to them,

 

[Rex Tyus]

It varies from state to state but if adjusters are reported for heavy handed tactics in Florida to the insurance commission it can get real bad for them. The trouble is getting a written statement from the insured as to what was said.

That being said it is an unregulated industry and it is easy to see why insurance companies have a preffered vender list. Have you seen some of the restoration work done by "professionals" ?

 

[LeeCory]

I agree Rex,

A few weeks ago I was called to clean the carpets after Serv Pro finished a basement water damage job.

I took my meters to give it a check before I did any cleaning just to make sure things were good. I was very surprised to find that the job was by no means done. It was a good thing for me since I was able to bring in my equipment and finish the job. The customer said they didn't use the meters that I used, and they just wanted to put in a bunch of equipment.

But the funny thing is..... Serv Pro is probably a "preferred vendor"....