Michael R. Hamilton VaRonda L. Hamilton Independent Insurance Adjusters LeighRand Ltd. Unprofessional practices Shreveport Louisiana

This report is about a third party claims adjuster hired by Travelers Insurance Company, who in turn hired Carli & Associates who contracted this adjuster.  Keep in mind, I am not complaining about the amount of time it took for the adjustment to be processed.  My issue is with how this particular adjuster decided to handle requests for updates.

I had an insurance adjustment being processed by these individuals.  Initially I was told the process would be take 6-8 weeks to finalize.  This is a Hurricane Sandy claim so I understand there would be some sort of delay.  As a diligent consumer and a homeowner waiting on documents in order to process numerous other items contingent upon this claim, I periodically made attempts to check in on the status of my claim.  This is the response I received over 2 months after the evaluation of my home was done.  I never expected to receive an email response like this.  This is verbatum, I have not edited or removed anything.  As per ripoffreports policy, I have added paragraphs as this was originally one long paragraph.

"I received a message today stating that you notified your agent who in turn notified Carli & Associates who in turn notified me. As we explained before your claim is very near completion. To be honest, it would have been done over a week ago, but we spend about 40% of our day responding to queries about status and 2nd advances.

We received an email from Travelers about a week ago stressing the importance of returning calls and emails about status, because they were spending about 30% of their time taking calls from insureds who were calling and claiming they had not heard from us and do not know the status of their claim. This is only happening from about 20% of our claimants. We have heard nothing from about 80% of people for whom we conducted inspection. Some of those people were inspected before you. 

So out of about 12 hours that we work every day, we spend 3 of those just responding to emails and phone calls. So when you call or email me, you stop one person from working on a claim that will be done before yours is completed. When you call Carli & Associates, you stop two people. When you call Travelers, you have now stopped 3 people from working on claims that were before yours, because Travelers will call Carli who will then email me. So now at the very least 15 minutes have been lost from that one contact.  So every time that you contact any of us along the chain, you just delay when you will receive your claim.

People who were inspected before you, deserve to have their claim completed, just like you deserve to have your claim completed before others who were inspected after you.  We told you the day that we inspected your claim that it would be 2 to 3 months before your claim is complete.

The biggest problem that we have had is not the number of claims that we are working, it is claimants not waiting until at least that 2 months before they start calling to check status. If nobody called to check status until that 2 month mark, almost everyone without fail would have received his estimate prior to that 2 month mark. Instead, people started calling as early as 4 weeks after we were at their homes. (We even had one guy call 2 day later. ) 

So please help us to expedite your claim by patiently awaiting your estimate that we will send you by email.  There is nothing that can be done to speed the process, but there is plenty that can be done to slow it."

Needless to say, I was absolutely floored when i received this email response to my inquiry.  

The claim that I was told the process would take 2-3 months is false.  It is completely possible that some time after inspecting my home, the adjuster had realized 6-8 weeks (as we were told) was an unrealistic timeframe, and began telling clients 2-3 months instead. The reason I had attempted a contact just over 2 months later was based upon the 6-8 weeks timeline I was given.  Just over 2 months is slightly more than 8 weeks.

Blaming diligent consumers like myself for creating delay's is completely unprofessional.  It seems as though this adjuster decided Sandy was a great opportunity to make money, however he didn't anticipate the amount of work he got himself into.  The tone of this email was so unprofessional, I feared a response would further delay or even moneterally affect the outcome of my claim.  I therefore did not even bother responding.  

In a time where my family is attempting to put our life back together, the last thing we needed was an unprofessional email from a person who has our future of our rebuilding process in their hands.