How the relationship between restoration contractors and insurance companies has changed
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Narrator: Allen Booth, is a Co-founder of Firstonsite restoration, and has over 50 years of experience in the construction/ restoration industry. He talks to ILSTV about the changes over the years in the relationships between restoration and insurance companies.
Allen Booth: Certainly some things have improved. The claims departments didn’t use to get the latest in technology. So typically a restoration contractor would have a fax machine before the claims department would; or we would have a cell phone before the claims adjuster would; or we would have access to lap tops before the claims adjuster would.
But now I think the insurance companies are looking at the claims department as an opportunity to sell their product because if you buy an insurance policy you really don’t know what you have, other than a piece of paper in a drawer, until you have a claim.
I think it’s generally accepted now that a claim well-handled by a claims department and their vendor network is probably one of the best marketing tools they have.
So they’re certainly focusing more on the service and delivery of the vendor network more than in the past. They’re focusing on pricing more than they have in the past by way of buying pricing data bases; some of which are accurate and some of which are not particularly accurate for a given area, or possibly not as current in the material costs as they could be.
There’s fewer insurance companies now than when I first started many years ago by virtue of mergers and acquisitions. So you find yourself dealing with a smaller customer base than we did at one point in time.
And I think the one other noticeable change with the insurance companies are from a claims department standpoint. They’re starting to act like one company more than they did in the past. An example would be a dictate from a claims executor in Toronto would be declared and it would hit the Rocky Mountains and probably die on the vine. It may not make it through Quebec all the way to the Maritimes. They are now finding ways to act as one company, so if they agree to do something coast to coast, by the time it hits the East and West coasts the message is fairly similar to what was voiced when it left Southwestern Ontario without some colorations in between. I think that is different from what it was before because you would hear of changes coming out of Ontario but we wouldn’t actually see it in the marketplace out West, and then I would talk to someone from the East Coast and they didn’t really see a noticeable change either, but that is changing now.
Other titles of interest:
50 Years of Change in the Construction Industry
Restoration industry needs to focus more on everyday events
