How to handle broken items claims from customers.
What do you do when you get a damage claim? Right, it’s inevitable, it’s gonna happen, no matter how hard you try, no matter how well you train your movers, no matter what processes and procedures you put in place. Whether it’s an antique piece of furniture that gets a scratch on, whether it’s a table with a broken leg, or shattered glass. There’s damage that happens on a move which is part of taking furniture, putting it in a truck and moving it. So what happens? What do you do when you get a damage claim? How do you address it so that you can keep your customer happy? How do you make sure that you don’t get as many claims in the future?
First thing you need to do when you get a damage claim to assess the damage. How bad is it? Is it something that can be repaired easily? Is it something that you need to call a repair guy and let him fix the furniture? Or is it something that’s completely destroyed? You need to assess the damage and you need to assess what it’s going to take to make the customer happy. It’s not just about repairing the furniture, it’s about making the customer happy, that’s the first thing you want to do, then you can either repair, pay or start the claim process. If you can, repair it on the spot, or you can send somebody out there to repair it, or if it can’t be fixed and the customer is willing to take a reasonable amount of money to resolve it, go ahead and pay them and make them happy.
Otherwise, you need to start the claim process and you really need to go through a step by step claims process. It is recommended to use a claim processing service company, there’s companies out there specialized in handling claims for moving companies. They just take the administrative tasks off your hand, they take the interaction with the customer and they handle it. They go through the step-by-step process, they get the pictures from the customer and the original receipt from the customer, they evaluate what it’s worth, what you should pay out and they’ll facilitate all the paperwork for you. Then you want to make sure that you get a signed agreement, if you’re cutting the customer a check after going through the claims process. Make sure that they sign an agreement stating that they can’t come back after you later and sue you for the damage that you’re paying them for.
The next step is to train your movers on the specifics, find out what are the causes of all the damage claims you get. You might be surprised how often movers make the same mistake over and over again. For example it may turn out that the majority of the claims are all for either glass tabletops, or marble tabletops. It would be unnecessary to retrain the movers on everything. It would make sense to retrain the movers specifically on how to protect the glass and marble tops. So you want to make sure you take care of the customer, but you also want to come back on the back end and prevent these problems from happening again.
The next step is to reward your movers for no claims. Generally speaking, the moving companies would deduct their movers for claims and charge them for any claims that they caused. But what you want to do is to have a good process for handling your claims. Make sure that you can address your claims as a company. Retrain them in certain specific areas that you know are problems and then reward them for doing a good job. That would be a huge bonus, it’s a win-win for you, the customer and your employees, it just makes your company better.
The key is to make sure that you’re making the customer happy and you want to have a system for that. First, you deal with the customer, then you find out why it’s happening, what the specifics are of what’s being damaged, then you train your movers on what they need to improve or fire them if you find out they are being completely negligent or have no idea what they are doing. All this results in additional money for your company, because if you’re spending money on claims that’s less profit period. A portion of your profit and loss statements is represented by the claims being paid out. Once that goes away and you eliminate it, there’s going to be plenty of money left over to reward the movers and of course extra profit left over as well. Not to mention the happy customers, the positive reviews, all of that just accumulates to help build your business.