Auto Insurance Company: How To Choose The Right One

It goes without saying that you should look for a reliable auto insurance company while purchasing your car insurance policy. In other words, you need to search for a company that answers your specific queries and most importantly, it should settle your claim quickly.

How to choose a reliable insurance company

Here are some steps that will help you to choose a reliable auto insurance company.

• Decide the type of coverage you need: Before you start looking for the right insurance company, you should at first decide the types of coverage you need. As for example, if you don’t have a good driving record, then you’ll have to look for a company that specializes in offering discount insurance policies to customers with a not so good driving record.

• Contact local body shops for recommendation: You can ask for recommendation from your local body shops that you trust. They’ll help you to identify a reliable auto insurance company. Local body shops have to interact with a number of insurance companies on a daily basis; therefore, they know which company offers a smooth and fast claim settlement system.

• Visit the website of your state insurance department: You can take help of your state insurance department to check “consumer complaint ratios” for all the auto insurance companies that sell their policies. This ratio will help you to know how many complaints an insurance company receives per 1000 claims filed by its customers.

• Consider financial strength ratings of the insurer: You should check the financial ratings of an auto insurance company before purchasing your policy. There are several companies that collect nationwide data from individual policyholders and rate them according to their price, claims adjustment, coverage options, satisfaction with company representatives and overall experience. However, you should rely on the data published by a reputed agency, such as, A. M. Best, Standard and Poor, Moody, Fitch, etc.

Apart from purchasing policy from a reliable auto insurance company, you can also purchase insurance policy from an agent. There are 2 types of agents, namely, captive agent and independent agent or broker. A captive agent represents only 1 insurance company whereas an independent agent represents several companies; therefore, an independent agent doesn’t have any vested interest in selling you a particular policy. The advantage of choosing am insurance agent is that he/she can become familiar with your requirements and can guide you in purchasing a suitable auto insurance policy from a reliable company.