How to get insurance adjusters to call you back – Did you file a claim with an auto insurance company and the insurance adjusters won’t respond to your calls? Read this article to learn what you can do. If you have any questions or comments, reach out to me. If I can’t help you, I’ll try and find someone who can. Now let’s jump to the point of how insurance adjusters call you back.
I received a lot of phone calls and I got a lot of question comments from people about the difficult times they had with the insurance company and in particular, their insurance adjusters.
How to Get Insurance Adjusters to Call You Back
First of all, this is not a shock. Because delaying or denying your claim is one of the ways that an insurance company can manipulate the system.
Read : 4 Pros & Cons: Hiring an Attorney to Handle Your Insurance Claim
They get people frustrated and they give up. So I thought in this article we’d talk about a couple ways to get that insurance adjusters to respond to your inquiries. But before I do, I just wanna point out something to you that you may not have thought of.
Insurance adjusters generally are handling hundreds of cases at a time, hundreds. Just take a look at the file that you’re dealing with for your case. It’s got medical records, the police report, pictures and stuff. Well, multiply that by two or 300 and you can see what an insurance adjusters is dealing with. So sometimes, they’re not just delaying your case, they’re just super busy.
But this article is not to make excuses for an insurance adjusters. Instead, let’s find a few ways to get around the system and work it in your favor.
OK, the first thing I would tell you is, you have to level set your expectations about what your experience dealing with an insurance company’s gonna be like. As I told you, they’re super busy. So don’t expect a call back right away.
I’ve had some people call me and say they called their insurance adjusters yesterday and they haven’t gotten back to them. Well, it’s gonna take them 24 hours to get back to you. Your inquiry just goes in a long list of other inquiries that they already have and they’ll get back to you in due time. But if it’s been more than 24 hours, then you need to take action. What’s the first thing you can do when dealing with an insurance adjusters?
Well, this is very self-serving and I apologize, but you can hire a lawyer.
Insurance companies respond quicker and deal more fairly with a personal injury attorney than they do with somebody who’s never worked the insurance system before. I always tell people and I will stay consistent on this, you wanna maximize the amount you can recover and have the process go as smoothly as possible, get an attorney to represent you. One more reason to hire an attorney, there are things that an attorney can do to get an insurance company to respond that you may not know about. And in particular, I’m talking about setting the table for what’s called a bad faith claim.
I’m not gonna talk about bad faith in this article, and the chances of actually prevailing on a bad faith claim are fairly slim. However, it’s one of the pieces of leverage that an attorney uses to get an insurance company to respond, and it’s one of the only pieces of leverage that you have on your side because the insurance company has what you want, and that’s the compensation for your injuries and damages. Okay, the second thing you can do, go above your adjuster’s head.
I’ve done this so many times and it’s very effective. If your insurance adjusters is not responding to you, call the insurance company operator, the customer service phone number, and ask who is the manager for your insurance adjusters.
Get their contact information and reach out to them. I think you’ll be surprised at how quickly moving forward that insurance adjusters responds to you. Another thing you should be doing is documenting all your correspondence with the insurance company. Leaving voice mails is fine, but they’re not very impactful. But after you leave a voice mail, if you sent an email or a fax to the insurance company that says, “I just left you a voice mail.
This is the third voice mail I’ve left you. My property damage issue still hasn’t been resolved. Please contact me at such and such a number,” that will have much more impact on the insurance adjusters than just leaving a voice mail.
Now, if you’re having a really hard time with the insurance adjusters, some people will contact their state department of insurance and file a complaint. I have found that that’s not particularly effective.
It doesn’t do much. I’ve tried it a couple times on cases that I’ve been involved in. It gets you very little. And so I don’t really recommend that. I think documenting with the insurance company is a much more effective tactic.
However, some people believe that filing a complaint with the department of insurance sets an insurance company up for potential claims later on. And if you want to do that, there’s certainly no harm in doing it. Just don’t expect a lot to come out of it.
OK, one last thought about putting pressure on an insurance company to respond is that, they don’t have a lot of pressure to respond absent the filing of a lawsuit. So when you submit a claim with an insurance company, there’s rules and regulations that they have to follow and responding in 30 days or whatever, but those don’t have a tremendous impact.
However, filing a lawsuit will get an insurance company to respond. What they’ll do is they’ll assign counsel and the attorney that they assign will have to file an answer to the complaint within a set amount of time. So if you really are having a hard time with an insurance company, the one piece of leverage you really have is to file a lawsuit.
Now, if you only have property damage, meaning that there was no bodily injury involved in the accident, and the insurance company is stonewalling you, well, that’s a tricky situation because you’re not gonna be able to find a lawyer to represent you on a property damage case, unless the case is worth a ton of money and you wanna pay a lawyer on an hourly basis. So what do you do in that situation?
Well, I tell people all the time, go ahead and file a lawsuit on your own behalf in small claims court. I’ve talked about it on this channel, but that’s what small claims court is for. It’s super easy. In my home state of Illinois, it is for cases that are $10,000 and under. You can do it yourself.
You may be able to do it online. You have to pay for filing the lawsuit and you have to pay for the sheriff to serve the lawsuit on the defendant.
Maybe your jurisdiction allows you to mail by Certified Mail the lawsuit. You have to check the rules in your state. But filing a claim in or filing a lawsuit in small claims court is a really viable option in this situation.
Now, if you have bodily injury, again, I think you’ll be much better served by hiring a lawyer to represent you. But I’ll leave it to you to decide with regard to that matter. OK, it’s time for you take on the law. Did you have a hard time reaching your insurance adjusters? Were they stonewalling you?
Tell us about it in the comments section below. And finally, hopefully the discussion about How to get insurance adjusters to call you back is useful and helpful to you.
