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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
companies 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,” “courtesy and helpfulness,” “not unreasonably cutting coverage,”
and “not unreasonably raising premiums.” 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 shops were mentioned either favorably
or unfavorably less than 10 times, a high or low score may be mostly a
matter of luck.
On our Ratings Tables, we have reported the number of private passenger
auto insurance complaints filed in 2007 with the Washington State Office
of the Insurance Commissioner. 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
number of 2007 complaints per $1 million in 2007 direct private passenger
auto insurance premiums written.
Our price comparisons list companies’ annual premiums for four illustrative
families for five addresses in the Puget Sound area.
We obtained the rates whenever possible from the companies’ websites. If
a company did not have a website with online rate quotes or we could not
obtain quotes from a company’s website, our researchers called the company’s
agents and, without disclosing their affiliation with CHECKBOOK, obtained
the price quotes over the phone.
The price comparisons pages list the details of each family’s characteristics
and also the assumptions we made when collecting the rates. All premiums
are annual rates and assume the policy was being written as new business
for the company. Some rates were rounded to the nearest whole dollar.
It should be noted that the premiums were collected using CHECKBOOK staff
members’ actual personal information and driving histories. Since your
characteristics, driving history, and other information are likely different
from those of our sample drivers, the companies that are lowest priced
for you may be different from the results we obtained for similar profiles.
We give checkmarks to firms that score highest on a scoring system that
we devise for each service field. This system 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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