[SATLUG] Anyone know anything about USAA?

[Brad Knowles]

At 1:19 AM -0500 4/25/07, Dennis Myhand wrote:

>  I do not want to sound like I am coming to the defense of any insurance
>  company, but I don't know of one which will not do every thing they can
>  to keep the money paid into them.

Certainly, they are in business to make money.  And they do that by 
taking your money (and money from a lot of other people), then 
playing games with statistics to help them determine how likely they 
are to have to pay money back out and to whom.  The game is to try to 
ensure that everyone pays more money into the system over the long 
term than they will take out, with the difference being the profit 
that the company makes.

However, there are still some companies out there that do care more 
about good customer service, as opposed to just ripping everyone off 
for the maximum amount possible.


The smaller companies generally tend to have better customer service, 
because they want to grow and to become bigger companies.  The bigger 
companies generally tend to have worse customer service, because 
you're so small that you're virtually meaningless to them, and they 
don't care if they piss you off, so long as they don't piss off too 
many customers and cause excessive negative customer growth.

The ratio of number of customers to quality of customer service is 
the measure of a good insurance company.  On this scale, the "good" 
insurance companies are the ones that provide a relatively high level 
of customer service for a relatively large number of customers.

USAA used to be that kind of a company.  Now they are way, way below average.


Within the insurance business, "mutual" insurance companies tend to 
do pretty well, because each customer is also a stockholder, and all 
members help insure all other members.  Relatively speaking, this is 
as close as you get to a non-profit organization in this field.

If you go to ConsumerReports.org and look at their various reports on 
insurance, one of the sites they recommend that members use for 
getting insurance quotes is <http://www.insure.com/>.  I haven't seen 
any direct ratings of insurance companies on the ConsumerReports.org 
website, but I have seen some good general articles on the process 
you should go through in choosing an insurance company, what kinds of 
insurance you may or may not need, etc....  And then there's this 
link to the insure.com website.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
Slides from Invited Talks: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4>