Pleasing 100 percent of the people 100 percent of the time is impossible, the saying goes, and if anybody can verify the certainty of that statement, it's adjusters.
With that in mind, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners studied the top reasons consumers filed formal complaints against their insurance companies in 2005, and concluded that delays, denials, and unsatisfactory settlement offers were the top three reasons insureds put pen to paper to write complaints.
Following these claim-handling issues, NAIC reported that consumers complained most about policy cancellations and premiums/insurance rating issues, a pattern that they say has remained consistent during the past four years. More surprisingly, the total number of complaints filed by consumers in 2005 (199,639) represented a 22.5 percent decrease from 2004.
Company-specific complaint ratios, which compare complaints against a company's market share of premiums for a specific policy type, as well as aggregate counts of complaints by state and by type of coverage for specific companies, also are available in the report.
"Our goal is to make sure that consumers have appropriate information to help them make informed decisions when purchasing insurance products," said Catherine Weatherford, executive vice president and CEO of NAIC. "One of those tools is the complaint ratio report that is available on [our] web site and on many state department sites. As that information becomes more familiar to the public, we would like to believe that adjusters and companies are pressed to do a better job."
Is there anything NAIC thinks adjusters can do to improve? "We believe the most important thing a claim adjuster can do is to listen to claimants and try to hear what they have to say," said Weatherford. "If a claim payment is denied or is less than the claimant expects, taking time to explain can go a long way toward minimizing complaints."
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