Filing a claim and awaiting the insurance check when your car is damaged is never fun, but consumers are more satisfied nowadays with how their insurers handle the process. Now, if only body and repair shops can amp up their games, a new J.D. Power & Associates survey shows.
J.D. Power, of Sunnyvale, Calif., found that auto insurance claims were being paid faster and, as a result, that overall claimant satisfaction with the claims process rose in the fourth quarter of 2012 from the same period a year earlier.
The study measures claimant satisfaction with the claims experience for auto physical damage loss.
The study found that the average time to pay claimants fell to 13.9 days in the fourth quarter, down from 16.4 days in the same period of 2011. While the average time to pay claimants for a repairable claim (11.8 days) has decreased by 1.3 days from the fourth quarter of 2011, the largest decrease is in the time it takes to pay total-loss claims, down by an average of 5.1 days to 18.5 days.
But that good-news claims story falls short when you factor in the time it now takes to get your vehicle roadworthy again.
The survey found that the average time it takes to repair a damaged vehicle rose 1.2 days, to 13.5 days in the fourth quarter vs. 12.3 days a year earlier.
“While insurers have made significant progress in the past 12 months to improve the efficiency of the claims process, the repair providers have not kept pace,” said Jeremy Bowler, senior director of the insurance practice at J.D. Power. “Failure to repair a vehicle correctly is critical to the customer experience as average satisfaction scores tumble over 100 points for those who had to bring their vehicle back for repeat repairs.”
