In my recent post Claims Adjusters Are Brainwashed: Public Adjusters Are Not to Be Trusted, I raised the concern that much of the industry’s training deliberately paints public adjusters as greedy, dishonest, and close to fraudulent. That concern was challenged by Steve Badger and others who suggested that what really happens is training adjusters to deal with a small group of bad actors, not broad stereotyping of the profession. The reality, however, is that written industry training materials tell a very different story.
Attached to this article is a sample session outline distributed by the Property Liability Resource Bureau (PLRB) for use by its presenters. The title itself is telling: “How to Be Assertive and Effective When Dealing With Public Adjusters.” The very structure of the outline shows that the session is designed not to explore public adjusters in a balanced light, but to train claims professionals that public adjusters are adversaries to be managed, avoided, or defeated.
The learning objectives include identifying the “typical modus operandi for aggressive public adjusters.” The session devotes a segment to describing the “typical aggressive public adjuster,” labeling them as confrontational, stubborn, and accusatory. The recommendations include such instructions as “if you don’t need to deal with them, don’t.” Other advice focuses on how to bypass or sideline public adjusters by involving the insured directly, holding them to burdens, or refusing to participate in appraisal.
What this document reveals is not a narrow effort to deal with the occasional bad actor. Instead, it reflects a cultural assumption built into training with a lesson that public adjusters as a class are a problem to be managed rather than professionals to be engaged.
This is precisely the point I made in my original post. The training does not start from a position of neutrality. It starts from a stereotype. And once training instills that stereotype, it becomes part of the culture of the entire claims organization.
When Steve Badger and those who make a living supporting the insurance companies respond by saying that insurers are only targeting a few bad apples, they deflect from the institutional reality. The culture is set from the top down, through conferences, training sessions, and outlines like the PLRB’s. The culture is not built around preparing adjusters to collaborate fairly with public adjusters who act professionally. It is built around preparing them to see public adjusters as aggressive and untrustworthy, and then to equip them with tools to resist and marginalize them.
The cultural framing by claims management and those who are expected to repeat the company line is not limited to the individual adjusters in the field. It permeates management, it shapes the questions that are asked, and it informs the attitude that claims organizations carry into every dispute.
This is why public adjusters so often find themselves presumed guilty until proven innocent when they walk into a claim adjustment. They are not simply encountering an adjuster who had a few bad experiences. They are confronting an adjuster whose very training framed them as the enemy. That is not only unfair to the public adjusting profession; it is unfair to policyholders, who are deprived of a process where their licensed representative is given a fair opportunity to work cooperatively on their behalf.
This morning at the Win the Storm conference, where Steve Badger and I were presenting on a panel, one of the panelists was an apartment complex portfolio CEO with many different properties under her management. She explained that all of her insurance claims were either denied or severely underpaid. As a result, she was referred to a public adjuster. Finally, her company’s claims were paid because of what she described as a fair and honest public adjuster.
The insurance industry does not want to hear this honest and frequent narrative. Professional public adjusters make a difference when it comes to forcing the cost-cutting insurance industry to Pay Up! (Click the link for more information about how to deal with insurance companies.)
The PLRB outline is just one example, but it is representative of a broader industry practice. The outline demonstrates clearly that my original point stands: the insurance industry does not just teach its adjusters how to deal with occasional misconduct. It indoctrinates them into a culture where public adjusters are stereotyped and distrusted from the start. Until that culture changes, there will be little hope for the kind of cooperation and fairness that policyholders deserve.
Thought For The Day
“In the end, we’re all works of art.”
—Mr. Brainwash (Thierry Guetta)
#Insurance #Training #Public #Adjusters