Full Transcript for Avoiding Refusals and Non Productive Reports

run, and provide that to the inspector as part of their inspection. And that can be triggered at the time that's ordering. And all those things obviously incur fees. So it becomes very difficult to just say, Hey, we can cancel this up to 10 days after the order, because a lot of stuff happens within seconds sometimes when these orders are placed in. So that's one thing that might cause a higher fee for a cancellation. Another thing is, a lot of inspection companies do hazard hub queries, or they'll use Melissa Data are some of the other data services that basically compile demographic data or attribute data on the different properties particularly for property risk, obviously, and those all incur costs. They're not a lot of costs, but they are costs and if you're not being able to build anything for the report, then that's obviously a loss out of your pocket. They also do some checks I know we do some for confirming that the address and phone number is Correct. And usually that's just a cue against a database that will tell you that yes, you know, we had that name match with that particular address, or at least that address is valid. And that helps out too. Sometimes none of that's done. It all depends on the client. And it's up to the inspector to scrub that data and make sure that the information is correct. So they're going to go in and do what they call a pre inspection workup. Sometimes where they pull assessor information, they map out the where the where the risk is going to be. They use that to plot out their days and they also use a certain number of inspections to make the days worthwhile. Tom LeGros  6:32   So if in a cancellation doesn't happen very quickly, a lot of work can take place on an inspection report. Basic cancellations do happen, but the the best thing that we can suggest is that that cancellation is made as fast as possible after the order and with an understanding and an agreement with your service company that there may be a charge depending on the type of inspection how much work is done. Usually, we don't allow a cancellation in most cases, if the inspectors already made an appointment call or has made multiple calls to the insurer, there's been some phone tag going back and forth. In other words, they've invested some time. When you look at the way a lot of these inspections are done, especially if multiple calls are needed, you may spend 30 minutes on telephone calls before even getting a chance to get an appointment and go out on the inspection. And you know, that's 30 minutes of time, that's generally not compensated, if you're not able to get an inspection completed. With cancellations out of the way, we can take a look at refusal. There's a couple of different reasons for refusals, and we're going to go over the reasons and then some cues on how to avoid each reason. One of the biggest reasons I see is the insurance lack of information. You have an inspector that calls up out of the blue and says By the way, I need to come by and take a look at your property or I need to combine ask you questions about your business. Take a look at your operations. This is where your workers comp insurance is for your property insurance, etc. And I represent ABC company. They don't recognize the name of the company sometimes because they may go through a brokerage. They may go through their agents so they remember ABC agency But they don't realize that XYZ insurance is the ones that actually write the insurance on the policy. So they don't understand who you are. They certainly don't know you as an inspector. And some of the emails, obviously, inspectors are independent contractors, so their emails may not have the company name or may not have the carrier name, it wouldn't. So even email introductions do not necessarily work. So there's a couple of different ways to avoid this. And one of the most important ways is on the carrier side. And that is need to make sure that agents know what triggers loss control visits, because not every risk that's written gets a loss control visit and it's not done every year. Certainly renewals, it varies. So if your agents understand what's going to trigger a loss control inspection, and make sure that they inform the customer in advance, because that way, they'll know and a lot of times they even sign off on the paperwork when they're doing the binding of the policy. The insured will sign a document that says that this is this is subject to underwriting and that means that underwriting will take a look at The policy that's being bound and they could have a decision not to not to cover it. But like anything, that's a huge amount of legal paperwork, whether it's a home mortgage, car loan or whatever, people don't read every bit. And it's not necessarily pointed out to them when they're looking at it, that this is in fact an agreement to allow for an inspection. Another way to avoid this, besides talking to your agents in advance, is a notification email or letter. There's a lot of companies out there now that are writing insurance that are called insurer Tech's and these insurer Tech's basically bypass the whole broker agent model, and they go direct to the internet. So you may have a company that gets on for workers comp insurance or GL insurance, whatever. And they just put in some information on a web portal, and they get automatically bound and then underwriting takes over after that point. That's why a notification email or letter would be very important to come out. And we have a lot of clients that do that, that at the time that the policy is bound, an email is sent out to the email that's on file because obviously if you're registering or if you're you're signing up for insurance online, you're going to have to use Use your email address because that's how your receipts and things are going to come back. And the insured would then get an alert saying that you will be contacted by preferred reports or whatever company it is

within seven to 10 business days to arrange for an on site visit or to arrange for a telephone interview as part of the underwriting process. And then they would send up a follow on, you know, a couple of days later, that way, at least the insured knows provided they pay attention to it or read it, the insurer knows that they're going to be contacted specifically by a certain company. If you don't know if you have a pool of companies, you could just say that you will be contacted by one of our contractor representatives, or one of our service companies to conduct an inspection of your property or an interview with one of your managers or employees or whatever to discuss the operations of your company. That helps a lot because when you try to call up and get that information over the phone cold, the insured has no idea who you are no idea what's going on and they're not necessarily going to want to provide what they would consider confidential or personal information to somebody just over the phone, especially nowadays. Tom LeGros  11:05   Now for inspectors, there's some things you can do, you need to be confident on the phone. And that means make sure you read over the policy paperwork or whatever it is that comes with the order. So that you know who the agents name is, you know who the company that's writing the policy is, you know, the type of insurance that it is, and you know, the type of company that you're calling and who you're calling, because all those things are important to establish your credibility when you're talking to an insured. So when you call up and ask for Mr. Smith, and you advise him that you're a loss control consultant working on behalf of XYZ insurance company and your agent is Henry Johnson at ABC Company, then he's going to know that more than likely, you are somebody that should be calling them up and asking these questions. At any rate, you know who their insurance company is, you know who the agent is. So that gives you some level of credibility. Where you start running into trouble is if you don't get the line of coverage, correct, because if you say yes, I'd like to come out and take a look at your property when it's workers comp insurance. They're gonna wonder, and they may ask you over the phone, why do you need to see my property you're here I'm taking inside as workers comp policy for my my builders that work out on job sites, it's actually supposed to be a job site inspection, but you miss read it and said you thought it was a regular property and casualty report, that hurts your credibility, the insured has to know that you know what you're doing. And if anytime during that call, you don't express that, that's when they start getting a little apprehensive about setting up appointment at that time. And what they'll do is they'll generally say, look, you need to call my agent and have him arrange this, this is why I have an agent, and they hang up or they'll say, I need a letter from from the carrier or from

the agency saying who you are that I'm supposed to talk to you. And then you also get another one where they'll say I'll call you back after I talked to my agent. Obviously, they're going to do whatever they want to do, and there's no reason for you to try to talk them out of it because that would just even hurt your credibility more. Tell them thank you very much. I appreciate it. Go ahead and call your agent. I'm going to call them as well just to let them know that you're calling So that way they know why you're calling and they can give you the information you need, so that we can go ahead and set up this appointment. And then as soon as you get off the phone, if you had the opportunity to do so, call up the agent, let them know that you just spoke to whoever they insured that you're trying to arrange for a loss control visit. And they were a little apprehensive because they didn't know who you were, and then wanted some more information. That way the agent can say, Look, I'll take care of this, just call him tomorrow, or I'll call him if I don't hear from them. Check back with me in a day. And usually you're able to get an appointment set up at that time. These are frightening times for your insurance. They're understandably apprehensive about a meeting new people in their homes or businesses, but you have to get the information necessary to be able to underwrite their insurance policies. Preferred reports one of the largest nationwide providers of insurance loss control surveys has the answer. Get your inspections done ASAP, as safely as possible, using our revolutionary self assessment or smartphone application with your insurance and answer questions. Provide photos and other documentation for your underwriting file. Using state of the art validation technology, you can be sure the information you get is being received from your insurance as a standalone or combined with a physical inspection reference ASAP app is your way to get critical information now, contact preferred reports today, I prefer reports calm, that's preferred reports.com and ask about their new ASAP and safe as possible digital inspection product. Tom LeGros  14:39   Another way that refusals occurs when the insurance become wary of the inspection actually during the inspection, and this is because of the questions that may be asked. Or it may be that they're starting to see more and more things that might be considered negative as they go through an inspection for instance, if you're walking through the property and you point out all your fire extinguishers are five years They haven't been touched and they're showing as discharged. So you have a problem with the fire extinguishers that could potentially start saying, Okay, what else have I got wrong? What am I going to do to get this inspection over with before I end up losing my insurance. So it's important that when you go through a situation like this, it can become very tense. But what you have to do is be polite. And if the insured just says, Look, I don't want to continue this inspection, thank them and move on. Unknown Speaker  15:25   But try, Tom LeGros  15:26   I mean, it really comes down to inspection technique, it really comes down to being able to determine what the person's state of mind is, as you're asking questions. Are they concerned or they're apprehensive, or they just, you know, going along with things without a problem. One of the good ways to set this up is from the very beginning, is tell them look, I'm gonna ask you a lot of questions. Some of them may not necessarily be on point, but it's just because I'm trying to find out information about your business. I have a lot of information already. But there's some things obviously, that we don't know that we wouldn't mind having some answers on. And just because I asked you a question and you have to answer, no does Not mean as a negative thing, because it may not apply to you. And that's what we'll mark is that it doesn't really apply to you. And that works out really well, because it gets them comfortable saying no, or answering a question negatively, because they don't automatically assume that if they say no, that's going to be a point off of them and some scorecard that you're keeping, and that is going to cost them more premium money or, you know, cause him to have to go look for insurance elsewhere. It really comes down to that interview process. Remember, as an inspector, you are there to observe and report, you really just basically take notes in what you see and tell them in advance you have your notepad or whatever it is that you're using and say, Look, I'm going to write a lot of notes. Just because I'm writing something doesn't mean it's wrong. It's just an observation that I have to put in my report. Get them used to seeing you do that. Get them used to seeing you take photographs by taking a lot of photographs initially. Do not just you know, ask him Well, where's your sprinkler system you get over there, the things rusted shut, it's it's falling apart. Half the pipes aren't hooked up and you're in a factory right? If you start saying, huh, this, this, this is bad and start taking pictures and tisk tisk and start writing big axes and red pens and all that kind of stuff. Chances are, the guy's not going to be real happy. And you may not be able to finish the inspection. Obvious is an extreme example. Hopefully you wouldn't do that. But there are times when stuff is just bad. And you generally have to say, Yeah, okay, we'll move on and make sure that you have that noted as a red flag when you're doing your report. There are some things that happens by some companies that require an inspectors to do what's called closeout meetings, or meetings that where you discuss the negative things are the things that you're going to be making what's called recommendations on a recommendation is basically, the best way to you know, liken it to a traffic ticket, okay? These are the things

that you need to improve on. If you don't improve on them. Obviously, the inspector doesn't tell him what's going to happen but in your mind, it's automatically set that if I don't do this, I'm going to lose my insurance is going to cost me more money. So make sure that if you have to do one of these closing costs, conferences and I really I never liked them. It's it's great, hey, insurance carriers is great when you have internal laws, control staff that are out there doing account service work. And they understand that the person in front of them is a representative of the insurance company and that they have the ability if they wanted to, to cancel the policy or change things or whatever. Whereas with a consultant, you're just out there to observe and report. And if you make them, you know, function in that capacity of having to sit down and chat with people about the recommendations that are made, it ends up becoming very quickly a debating society where you say, oh, could you improve the housekeeping back in the shop area? Well, I don't see what's wrong with it. It's been like that all the time. The last guy that came out, didn't say anything about it. So I don't really see why that's a problem. Now you're going to get into a debate about you know, you can't, you have to do your recommendation. So you have to be real careful how you respond back to that. And that's why unless you're very good at de escalating a situation for somebody like that, when you're giving them these recommendations, it can become sticky, so I've never been a fan of it. Obviously. If the insurance company wants you to do it, if your customer wants you to do it, you do it, but you have to do it in a certain way. And there are ways to do it is where as you're walking around, you can tell them, Hey, I noticed that two of those fire extinguishers back there were expired, you're probably going to get them taken care of, I'm just going to have to note it on this. And at the end, just so you know, you're going to get a letter from the from the underwriter or whoever, don't take any action or whatever I'm telling you until you get that letter. Because what I say isn't always the final word is up to the underwriter or whoever to say whether or not that you need to make these changes. And at that point, it changes a bit it really they realize that it's not permanent, that there is an opportunity that maybe something you saw won't be passed through. And it makes it a little bit less intense. They don't like surprises and the carriers have always believed in, in going ahead and making sure that people knew that that recommendations were coming. But again, it really it really depends on how good you are as to whether or not you're able to get an insurer to really not debate with you. When that thing happens, now, if if things go bad during your inspection, they can really go bad. Tom LeGros  20:06   Okay? I've seen situations where we've had inspectors yelled at threatened, had a

gun pulled on them or were escorted off the property, that kind of stuff. And these were were good inspectors, I had no doubt that they did everything they were supposed to do to make things work. But negative things were found on the property or maybe something that the insurer didn't want to get out was observed. So they figured it was best to just close it down. As an inspector, you should respect the person's absolutely Have a nice day I'm heading out, leave the property, get in your car and drive off and then pull over up the road somewhere where it's safe and make a phone call to your manager and let them know what happened. They may ask you to call the underwriter or they will. And then afterwards make sure you you type out a pretty quick email when you get back home or something explaining what happened. So that way the underwriter can get with the agent because I assure you, the insured is going to contact your agent. Now agents you've heard all this stuff before. Whenever recommendations are coming out. Even after the recommendations, letters come out, they come back with well, that guy was a jerk. He came out here and just didn't look at anything. I don't see how he could write all these recommendations. Nevermind the fact there's photographs for everything that they wrote. Nevermind the fact that it's well documented that all these things established, the guy was a jerk, so I shouldn't have to do this right. Then those complaints get passed up the line, we see it come from the agents to the underwriter saying your inspector was a bad guy. And they don't understand where these these recommendations came from. Agents don't use inspectors as a crutch. If you have an insured that got you know, Hazard recommendations, it's easier for him to just make the necessary changes and everybody's happy and everybody moves on. I'm not saying that you should downplay it to your insurer do your customer but certainly understand that there's two sides to every story, sometimes more than two sides. And as an inspector, you don't really get money unless the inspections fully completed, you're not going to get paid your hundred percent rate. So they want to do everything they can to make sure that that inspection gets completed. Now underwriters You're more than agents, you hear this all the time where you get complaints in that the rep did whatever, you know, terrible things. And usually it happens not on good inspections that happens on inspections with a couple of recommendations. Some of them might be critical or mandatory wrecks whatever classification you use. And that's usually when you see that. So, you know, that's just the way it is in this business. Sometimes the reps are not good. And we've certainly had complaints that we've investigated, and we found that, hey, you know what, we feel that the insured is right on this. And we've Of course made adjustments to who we have contracted with, to do inspections. It's rare, but we investigate every complaint that comes in, we don't automatically assume that the insurer was wrong or the agent was wrong or the underwriters wrong, we investigate it and so does every other company out there. Nobody just takes it and dismisses it offhand. That would not we would stay in business that way. After we come back from the quick break, I'm going to give the reps a few ideas and tips on what they can do to make things better on this as well. And then we'll wrap it up and get ready for an Inspect the cast live next week. And that's going to be something new and special that we'll be doing. Tom LeGros  23:10   All right, here's some tips for inspectors. You know, if you go into a situation where the refusals get mad, we've already mentioned that, you know, a lot of it has to do with preparing the, the insured for what you're going to be doing to let them know that, hey, things or going to be written down, they're going to be asked about that sort of deal. Get him used to it. So that's definitely some of the approaches that you can take. But a few final thoughts on that. Don't ever take anything personally, those insurers don't know you at all. They have no idea. You know, what your job is. And even if you try to explain it to them, a lot of people just don't understand what loss control is. It's a part of insurance that commonly they don't encounter. On top of that you have no idea what their stresses are. The reason why they might be in a bad mood. I mean, it could be any number of things face it. I mean, the economy is a bit stressful right now. So any business owner is going to be really super cautious that anybody Coming around wanting to find out about their operations, you're the face of the insurance company. So you always have to be professional and understanding, you always have to look at it from their point of view. And remember, if they don't want to proceed with things or whatever, if they want to stop or if they don't want to answer a certain question, you're not a cop, you're not going to force him into it. Just get whatever information you can get. Remember, you're the eyes and ears the underwriter. So your job is to observe and report. And a lot of times you can observe a report without even asking questions, you can determine the construction style class of a building. That's a question that I never asked people, because you should be able to tell that by going up to the building and once you're in that's those are things that you should never ask. And in fact, a lot of people will print out the actual inspection questions and carry them with them. And kind of like flip through it and put notes next to each thing that kind of destroys your credibility. If you're an expert. If you're a professional, you pretty much know the questions that you're supposed to ask and believe it or not, there's a pretty common thread through most loss control and stuff. sections, they ask a lot of the same things properties, property liabilities, liability,

there are some twists and turns depending on what the operations are. But if you've been doing this for a while and you know your questions, you really don't have to go through the template as much as a new person does. And if I was a new person, I would try to learn the template. So that way, I can make sure that I'm getting the information that I need to get without having to look at a questionnaire form, because one really big way to lose your credibility is, let's say it's a multi purpose form because a lot of companies use one inspection form to cover a bunch of different things. And depending on which button, you click, it opens a bunch of extra questions up. You don't want to go into a manufacturing facility and ask them what is the hours of the daycare? And is there a medical log for the the children that are dropped off? There's no daycare there unless for some reason there was but there isn't going to be one. And the guy's going to say, Hey, we manufacture tires here. We don't have a daycare, what are you talking about? And it's really going to affect your credibility because they're going to realize that you're just reading off a form They can pretty much tell you anything they want. And you'll write it down as gospel, that becomes a problem. And the other thing is asking questions where the answer is pretty obvious already. So even while you're walking around, you'll see that it's sprinklered. And of course, you'll have to go to the riser and write down the information, but you're going to see the sprinkler heads as you're walking around. So you don't need to ask the guy Hey, is the building sprinkler. Same thing with alarms, if there's an alarm sticker, you see an alarm control panel, while you're waiting out in the lobby or whatever, for somebody to come up, you can go up to it. And if there's a flashing light, and it's troubled out, then obviously there's an alarm panel problem, and then you can ask them about it later on. Same thing is in the lobby, while you're waiting to be, you know, brought back to the person that you're meeting with or whatever. There's usually a fire extinguisher out there and it's going to have a tag on it. So at least you're going to get a baseline at the tag in the lobby has expired, more than likely, there's going to be other expired extinguishers, probably all of them because they're usually done as part of a subscription program or a regular maintenance program. If the one in the front isn't expired, then you still need to do some spot checks as you walk by But it's not that big of a deal. You've already got the information. You already know if it's an office occupancy, you can already see back, you know, cubicles or Harvard setup. Tom LeGros  27:09   So there's all kinds of answers that you can get without even asking the question to the insured. Now, if you want specifics about what their operations are, certainly you need to ask that. But you also need to know the right questions to ask because if you ask things that are totally unrelated to what they do, it hurts your credibility and face it. When you're interviewing someone, whether you're a reporter, whether you're an inspector, whether you're a police officer, whatever it's all about, coming from a position of credibility that they, they believe that you understand what you're talking about. If they don't think you know what you're talking about. If you ask them stupid questions, or make statements that don't make sense to them, they're not going to treat you with the same level of respect they would with a person who's given them some insight that you know what you're talking about that you're a professional and that they better not bs you because you're going to know what it is. So they they're a little bit different. And the final thing would be is for Our clients out there is remember that inspections pretty much only get fully paid on complete cases, incomplete cases, such as non productive refusals or whatever, the inspector as well as the inspection company gets paid less generally. So if you're an inspector out there, you want to make sure that you get that inspection done, you would prefer not to have a non productive and Matter of fact, like it preferred as a lot of companies, we monitor the number of non productive that inspectors turn in because that could indicate a problem. But at the same time, you want to get paid. If you I know, I used to run out my days, and I had a goal of how much money I wanted to be able to build for each day. And I would include those cases and if they turn on productive, that's, you know, $50 less or $100 less than I'm gonna have in my budget. And it could be the difference between a profitable trip if I'm going out of town to an unprofitable trip, especially if I have expenses for hotels and stuff that aren't passed along to the client because I as a, as an inspector would incur that, because I'm an independent contractor. I'm a small business person, so You have to think about all those things so generally when you hear or when you think that it's because inspectors not really working the case hard enough that's why or or an insured when they get a notice of cancellation letter says well I never heard from this person they never called me ever and it's the right number is the same number the insured the rep has been calling to the insured chances are the the inspector made the calls because again you don't get paid full price so why would you fake calls? Why would you not contact the insured? It just doesn't make any monetary sense. I'm sure there are some out there especially if they're compensated fairly highly for cancellations or non productive that maybe some people would do that. But I I've done work for a lot of the companies in the business and nobody really gave money away for not a you know for a non inspection report for just simply a closeout and of course for underwriters and for agents and all a closeout report can also provide you some variable information such as the business is no longer there. There's there's no forwarding address, the places vacant when I went there or whatever that may tell you that You definitely need to go ahead and cancel, because there is no more risk there. All right, well, coming up next week, we're going to do something special. We're going to do a live cast for inspect a cast on Facebook, it'll be audio, I don't think we'll do the video part that's pushing it a little bit for the technology. But we're getting used to it, we've had a great deal of response to the podcast. So obviously, we want to kind of make it a little bit more interactive, we want to actually add some guests to where it's not just me talking all the time doing a rather boring monologue for 30 minutes, we want to make sure that we have people coming in that are from the industry. So we've got some people that are lined up. That can talk about a couple of different topics. But the next one we're going to talk about is attracting people to the insurance business in general, and loss control in particular, because face it, we're having a massive Exodus over the next couple of years of people that are going to be retiring, that are no longer going to be doing this. In fact, the pandemic may have been one of the things that just pushed them to just stop doing this, especially if they were retired already and doing this Beside businesses or whatever, and face it, there is no real management track out there at the universities that teach you in the field. You know, in field underwriting or loss control, none of that stuff is it's it's part of what we do, but it's not really something that's taught. So we've got some ideas on how to address that and how to attract some fresh blood into the industry. So we can continue offering the services at the service level that clients expect. We, of course, have the automated processes, we have the self assessment programs, but as we always say, there is no substitute for an experienced inspector going out to the location, visiting it, talking to the insurance, talking to the company owner, walking around taking pictures. That's, that's the gold standard. And you've got at least do that once in the life of a policy, probably more than once, in addition to the self assessment apps that everybody has now. So think about that. And we'll be putting more information out over the next couple of days on when it's going to be it'll probably be in the evening on Tuesday, on our Facebook page. And we'll just go from there. So again, thanks a lot. Thank you. Listening in and expect a great deal of change happening at inspector Cass sponsored by preferred reports. Transcribed by https://otter.ai Copyright Windowless Media Atlanta 2020