Insomnia is getting the best of me, and my followers benefit! How does hail happen, or how does hail form? Here’s a great video with a diagram to show you exactly how those pesky ice balls come to life!
http://www.local8now.com/video?videoid=2950322
Hail this big can cause some SERIOUS damage. Contact the experts at IntelliDent if you are in need of Auto Hail Repair in the San Antonio, TX and surrounding areas. (855)830-4245. Ask for me, Celine!
Supplements–What are they? In short, body shops require supplements when they are performing repairs for an insurance claim and the insurance adjuster has missed some damage or left some necessary items off his or her original estimate.
Here’s how it works: say your car gets hailed on. The first thing you’re going to is contact your insurance claims office. Typically they’ll require you to run through their catastrophe tent where they’ll take a look at the damage and write an estimate. For a more detailed description on what to do after you’ve received hail damage, check out this post entitled “So I Got Hailed on…What Do I Do?”
So you’ve run through the tent and have a check in hand for say, $2,000. You bring the car to us, and we say “Well, it’s actually going to cost $3,000 to fix all the damage on your car.” You feel the need to panic and take it to 5 other body shops in town to see if they can fix it for the $2,000 you got from you insurance… only to find out that EVERY shop in town will charge you $3,000 to fix all the damage! Oh NO, right??? Wrong. There is no need to do that, in fact, that is a HUGE waste of your time. That’s not how it works. Insurance companies recognize that they are not going to catch all the damage on the first look, and they make it really easy for us to request a “supplement” in order to cover that last $1,000 in damage that they didn’t originally catch.
We’ll get into a little more depth here. First of all, your insurance company is going to require that we work off of THEIR estimate. They are not going to pay some arbitrary amount that we or any other body shop has written and sent to them. They want THEIR adjusters to assess the damage and write the estimate according to their system’s estimation on what repair of this magnitude should cost. That means that regardless of what we write on our estimate, they are only going to pay an approved and pre-determined amount for the repairs to your car. The good news is, we use the exact same pricing matrix that every single insurance company uses. So here’s what happens: you bring your estimate from your insurance company into us. Our estimate comes up higher than your insurance company’s (this happens 99.9% of the time as hail is very difficult to see and adjusters do not have on-hand the special paintless dent repair lights and other tools we use when fixing the damage, which we use when writing our estimate in order to make sure we are paid for every dent we fix). So if our estimate is higher than theirs, that simply means they missed some damage (since remember we use the same pricing matrix as they do). Not a big deal, but we will send this discrepancy up to the insurance company’s supplement approval department in order to be paid to fix ALL the damage on the car, not just what they saw the first time (typically our customers want ALL the hail damage fixed). If we don’t request the supplement, yet still tell our customer we’ll repair all the damage, it would be like fixing some of the dents for free. Who wants to do that? It’s not good for business either, to do work for free. I’m sure most of you reading this understand that.
What happens once we send a supplement request varies from insurance company to insurance company. If the discrepancy is over a certain dollar amount, they will usually send one of their adjusters back out to re-assess the damage. Sometimes they’ll require us to circle the dents in order to prove dent count, they’ll put sizers on the dents in order to determine the size, have us send pictures of the missed damage, have us send receipts of parts purchased that were NOT on the original estimate, and the list goes on. We do this all day every day, so we’re pretty good at getting the money owed on all hail damage repairs from your insurance. No matter what, you’re not going to have to pay any of the differences out of your own pocket that may arise. Guaranteed. Even if we send up a supplement that isn’t ultimately 100% approved (which usually doesn’t happen, but has happened a few times), you STILL will NEVER be responsible for any overages. That’s our guarantee.
As I mentioned before, 99.9% of the claims we deal with DO require some type of supplement. Sometimes it’s just missed damage, sometimes it’s a difference in part prices, and sometimes the insurance just doesn’t want to pay for ALL the damage on the vehicle in hopes you’ll just take the money and run. Writing the estimate BELOW what it’s actually going to cost to fix it is, in a round-about way, a method of ensuring you actually fix the car with that money instead of pocketing it. Any way you look at it, just know that supplements are very common in insurance claims and are especially prevalent among hail damage claims. But rest assured that when you bring your car to IntelliDent to fix, we’ll make the process as seamless as possible for you and will NEVER charge you anything out of pocket to fix the hail damage. That’s your insurance company’s responsibility, and we ensure they cover all the damage so you don’t have to.
Direct Repair Shops may not always be your best option. On top of the fact that you’ll definitely have to pay your deductible, they may be more inclined to perform conventional repair instead of paintless dent repair like we here at IntelliDent do. Like me on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/CelineAtIntellident for up to date information on hail damage repair in San Antonio and the surrounding metro area.
Direct Repair Shops, or commonly known as “DRP’s,” Direct Repair Programs, or Direct Repair Networks, are basically body shops with whom your insurance company has direct contracts to fix their customers’ vehicles. When you call in your automobile hail damage claim, many times your claims representative will encourage you to go directly to their DRP to have your estimate and repair done. Sometimes your insurance company will have their adjusters in-house at that body shop who are writing estimates and paying their insureds out for the covered damage. Other times, they may have a deal worked out with the shop where an employee at the shop writes the estimates, and your insurance agrees to simply pay whatever their estimate comes to.The way most insurance companies determine what shop to use as a direct repair shop is by going around to various shops in the area and seeing who will do the work the cheapest. If you’ve ever had body work done, you know that this is a disastrous way to determine who will work on your car. In this business, the proverbial saying “you get what you pay for,” definitely holds true.
There are three main reasons I highly recommend NOT going with the direct repair shop your insurance company has selected. The first main reason is that they’re going to charge you your deductible no matter what! They have to do this for a number of reasons; a major one is because the body shop’s agreement with the insurance is that they HAVE to perform the repairs for whatever the insurance company’s adjuster has written the damage at, and believe me, adjusters miss damage ALL THE TIME. So the body shop can’t afford to lose any more money than what they’re already more-than-likely going to lose since the adjuster missed some things. In fact, about 99% of the cars we see have at least some damage that the adjuster has overlooked, which we typically send a “supplement request” to the insurance for so they will pay for the COMPLETE repair of the vehicle (since typically, people want ALL the dents fixed, not just a few of them :). See my blog on “What is a Supplement and Why Do Most Claims Require Them?” to learn more about the supplement process. As a DRP, they aren’t allowed to supplement in most cases, so they need that last $250, $500, or $1,000 to make a profit on the car. Learn more about why we don’t need your deductible on my blog entitled “How Can You Waive My Deductible?”
Here is the second main reason I’d recommend not going to your insurance company’s direct repair shop: many time they are “Body Shops,” meaning they specialize in working on the exterior body of the car. This includes painting, replacing parts, and using fillers to fill in holes. Now, fillers and re-painting IS NOT ALWAYS BAD! I don’t want to mis-communicate that point here. You just REALLY need to make sure you’re going to someone who has a lot of experience and knows what they’re doing if you’re going to have fillers such as bondo put in your new car and are thus going to have it re-painted. Here’s a good video on the right and wrong types of bondo: http://youtu.be/x4RMnuz6ggA. Again, I’ll reiterate that in this business you GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR, and when an insurance company has selected a body shop who agrees to do work for cheaper than any other body shop in town, it’s important to ask yourself why have they agreed to do the work cheaper? What corners are they going to cut in order to save money for themselves and still make a profit? Are they using quality products that will last as long as the car? Or are they going to fill it and re-paint it with cheap products that will crack out over time, fade poorly as opposed to the factory paint job, or just look plain sloppy? So, back to the subject here, that a reason a Direct Repair Shop may not be a good option is that they ARE usually a BODY SHOP. We at IntelliDent are NOT a body shop; we are a paintless dent repair shop specializing in paintless dent repair (commonly called PDR) and dent removal via craftmanship and metal-working, a process which does NOT require new parts, fillers, or paint. For more information, see “What is Paintless Dent Repair, or PDR?” As opposed to us, body shops are going to be more inclined to simply purchase new parts, such as a new hood, roof, or decklid, instead of using PDR to fix your car’s hail damage. They do this because maybe they are not as quick at PDR as they are at simply purchasing and painting a new part, or because it’s actually cheaper to have their in-house guy who is well-seasoned at using fillers and re-painting perform the repair instead of paying a PDR specialist like the technicians we employ to fix the dents. Like I said, fillers and paint aren’t ALWAYS bad, but good paint guys are very hard to find, after-market paint ALWAYS de-values your car no matter how good it looks, after-market paint almost ALWAYS fades differently over time as compared to the factory finish, after-market parts, such as hoods or decklids, may not always fit your car exactly as an original manufacturer part does, and lastly, if your insurance company is paying for this repair, wouldn’t you want to have the work done by people who can make it appear as if your car NEVER had hail damage? Why take a chance at having a body shop do the work and completely de-value your car to the point you lose thousands of dollars when you go to sell it or trade it in down the road? If you ask me, I’d rather just have it done the right way the first time and save myself the headache.
The third and final reason your insurance company’s direct repair shop may not be your best option is that as a body shop staying stationary in one location for years upon years, they may not have much experience with hail damage, as it usually doesn’t hail in one area over and over. There are definitely cities that get hit more often than others, but for the most part, these body shops will have a hail storm for which they fix cars once ever 3 to 5 years. While we do maintain permanent locations all over the country (San Antonio, TX, Oklahoma City, OK, Parker, CO, Olathe, KS, Nashville, TN, Scottsdale, AZ, New Orleans, LA, Minneapolis, MN, and Chicago, IL), we also have mobile teams that travel the country to assist at catastrophe-level storms all year round, so we fix hail and only hail all the time! That’s kinda like if you have a cut on your face and need stitches…are you going to go to your family practice doctor to have him stitch it up? Or are you going to go ahead and opt for a plastic surgeon who specialized in cosmetic stitches and does that every day? Kind of a weird example, I know, but I think it gets the point across. Your family practice doctor can definitely do stitches, but if you want it to look great and not be able to tell, you’re going to the specialist. We’re basically the “plastic surgeons” of hail damage. Ha! I kinda like that example :).
We have elected to NOT be a direct repair shop for any insurance carrier. The main reason is that we have very well-trained and highly experienced technicians who are simply not willing to work for bottom-dollar prices than insurance companies would require us to work for. Additionally, as I mentioned before, insurance adjusters miss damage all the time when assessing hail claims. If we sign a contract promising we’ll perform the repair for the price the adjuster writes and not to supplement any estimate, we’d inevitably end up doing a lot of work for free. Who wants to do that?
Overall, I’m sure the Direct Repair Shops will do an okay job. But if you want your car to look like new, not have to have any questionable fillers or aftermarket paint on it bringing down its overall value, and want to not have to pay your deductible to have it fixed, bring it to a PDR shop like IntelliDent, and rest assured knowing your car is in the hands of the “plastic surgeons” of hail damage.
Thanks for reading, and I hope this helps!
~Celine Hobbs, (855)830-4245, IntelliDentPDR@gmail.com
http://www.intellidentpaintlessrepair.com/san-antonio-auto-hail-repair/
IntelliDent | Denver CO's Auto Hail Damage Experts 