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Three Ways to Research Auto Insurance Agents
When looking for local auto insurance agents, there are many ways to find out about them, none of which require FBI-level detective skills. The top three ways are listed below.
- Auto Body Shops
If you’re out to determine which insurance companies in your area cover repairs without hassles and in a timely fashion, your local body shop is a good place to start. And the repair technicians will probably be motivated to tell you about their experience because if and when you need to take your vehicle to them to be repaired after an accident, they would prefer to work with the insurance companies that are, well, easy to work with.
- The Gossip Mill
Good, old-fashioned talk of the town is one way to find out who has good rates, customer service, and general integrity. You can be sure that if you start asking around, people who are dissatisfied with the service they’ve received will be more than willing to tell their stories. From that, you can use the process of elimination to find out a few potential prospects, and then you can begin asking people what they’ve heard about those particular agents.
3. On-line Reviews
Especially if you’re new to an area and don’t feel comfortable soliciting opinions from strangers, you may be able to find some candid perspectives online. One way to do this for local auto insurance agents is to check out reviews on Google Places. To do this, simply do a Google search. As an example, I searched for “State Farm Insurance Madison,” and here are the results. If you scroll down a little, you’ll find the heading “Places for state farm insurance near Madison, WI,” followed by a list. Each business in the list corresponds to a balloon with an alphabet letter, so you can locate that “Google place” on the map you see on the right. If you look at the “A” entry, you’ll notice that there’s one review listed; you can click on “1 review-place page” to see the review which, in this case, is quite negative. Of course, just one review isn’t substantial, but in this case, it would be quite enough to deter me from giving any of the local auto insurance agents at that office any of my business.