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We regularly survey area CHECKBOOK and Consumer Reports subscribers for
their feedback on services they have used. For our survey on auto insurers,
we asked consumers who had had a claim or claims against their auto insurance
policies to rate their experiences “inferior,” “adequate,” or “superior”
on several aspects of service. Policyholders could rate their companies
on “simplicity of claims procedures,” “speed of claims payment,” “adequacy
of payment,” and “courtesy and helpfulness.” Our Ratings Tables show
the percent of each company’s surveyed policyholders who rated it “superior”
(as opposed to “adequate” or “inferior”) on each question.
We have included in our ratings tables all of the insurance groups or companies
for which we received at least 10 ratings on our customer surveys. If a
company is not listed in our ratings tables, it simply means we did not
receive at least 10 ratings for it; that fact has no negative or positive
implications.
The insurer names we use are short-hand and may relate to a group of companies;
the customer survey ratings are all that we received from customers who
identified what we judged to be the company or group associated with this
name.
Since some companies were rated by rather small numbers of raters, small
differences between two firms in the percentage of raters who gave a particular
rating (say, “superior”) should be ignored. The table below gives a rough
guide to minimum differences you should look for in deciding on one firm
over another.
When using these survey data, remember that the questions are to some degree
subjective and that the differences among firms might be explained by differences
in the personalities, backgrounds, critical standards, and other characteristics
of the raters or by biases these raters might have.
We also sent surveys to area auto body shops, asking them to name the two
insurers they considered “most desirable” for “treating their customers
(car owners) fairly” and the two insurers they considered “least desirable.”
For each company that received at least five total mentions (either favorable
or unfavorable), our Ratings Tables show the total number of times
the company was mentioned and the percentage of the mentions that were
favorable.
Keep in mind that in cases where companies were mentioned either favorably
or unfavorably only a small number of times, a high or low score may be
largely a matter of luck.
On our Ratings Tables, we have reported the number of private passenger
auto insurance complaints filed in 2005, 2006, and 2007 with the Massachusetts
Division of Insurance. We have also reported a “complaint rate” for each
company. The complaint rate is intended to take into account the fact that
some companies do much more business than others and therefore are more
exposed to incurring complaints. It is calculated as a company’s total
number of complaints in 2005, 2006, and 2007 per million dollars in direct
private passenger auto insurance premiums written for that time period.
We give checkmarks to firms that score highest on a scoring system that
we devise for each service field, which weights the various data in our
ratings tables based on our subjective judgment of their importance. Since
the scores are based entirely on information presented, you can apply your
own judgments, and decide whether you prefer firms we have not given checkmarks.
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