How to Deal with Damage Claims from Moves

Hey, my friend. It's Luis Massaro, CEO of Moving Mastery and founder of Moving Sales Academy. 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, it's gonna be damage on a move. You know, just it happens whether it's a, you know, antique piece of furniture that gets a scratch on it, you know, whether it's a table, the leg totally breaks off, whether it's glass that gets shattered and broken, you know, know, I mean, there's damages that happen on a move, which is part of taking furniture, putting it in a truck and moving it, right? So what happens? What do you do when you get a damage claim? How do you address it so that you can move on, keep your customer happy, and then work to make sure that you don't get as many claims in the future? All right, first thing you need to do when a claim happens, so when the customer calls and says they had some damage, or when your mover says, hey, you know, there was a little damage on this job, is you need to assess the damage, right? How bad is it? Is it something that can be repaired with a little furniture repair marker that maybe your head mover knows how to do? You know, is it something that you need to call a repair guy and let him come out and repair 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, right? It's not just about repairing the furniture. It's about making the customer happy. So that's the first thing you want to do then, repair, pay, or start the claims process. If you could repair it on the spot, repair it. If you could send somebody out there to repair it, repair it. If not, and the customer's, you know, willing to take a reasonable amount of money to resolve it, go ahead and pay them and make them happy and be done with it, all right? Otherwise, you need to start the claim process, and you really need to go through a step by step claims process. I recommend using a claims processing service company. I'll go ahead and put some links down below. There's companies out there that specialize in handling claims for moving companies. And what they do is they just take the administrative task off your hand. They take the interaction with the customer and they handle it. They go through the step by step, they get the pictures from the Customer, they get 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. All right? Then you want to make sure that with all complaints, damage is no different, that you resolve the issue, but with the damage, you want to resolve the issue. And always get a signed agreement. If you're cutting a check, 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. All right? A claims servicing company will help you with this, but you want to make sure you get a signature if you're cutting a check. All right, Resolve that issue. The next is train your movers on the specifics. Okay, I'll give you an example of this. I had an issue with claims, and I noticed it in one of my offices by reviewing my P and L, right, The profit and loss statement. So I'm reviewing the P and L, and I see that there's a high. You know, for one quarter, there would just seem to be a high dollar amount paid out in claims. Right. So I drilled down, I looked into our moving CRM. I saw that. I ran the claims report. I saw that we had a high volume of claims. So we started to look at what the claims actually were. And it turns out the majority of the claims were all for either glass tabletops or marble tabletops. And that was, like, the bulk of all the damages. Right. So what do we do? We don't retrain the movers on everything. We notice that certain movers didn't know how to do that properly. Right. In other words, regardless if we train them on it or not, they weren't protecting the glass tops, they weren't protecting the marble tops. They weren't moving them properly. So we retrain them on that specifically and resolve the issue. Right? So you want to make sure you take care of the customer, but you also want to come back on the back end and make sure that you prevent these problems. Problems from happening again. So drill down on the specifics. Look at what exactly the claims are. I mean, it. Unless your movers are just completely negligent and they're just breaking everything, in which case you need new movers or you need to completely retrain them. You can usually isolate what's happening, right? Is it. Is it scratches? Are they breaking legs off of tables because they're not moving them properly? Right. I mean, what. What Is the specific. Train them on the specifics. All right? And number five, reward your movers for no claims. All right, I know companies will deduct their movers for claims and charge them for any claims that they cause. But what you want to do is you want to have a good process around the way that you handle your claims. You want to make sure that you can address them as a company, retrain them in certain specific areas that you know are problems, then reward them for doing a good job and not just look at it and say, you know what their job is to move furniture and they get paid for that. They shouldn't be damaging stuff. You know what, if you want them to not damage furniture, reward them for it. You know, that's a huge bonus. It's a win win for you, the customer, for them, all the way around. It just makes your company better. That is your mover doing an excellent job. If they go out and they make your customer happy and they don't damage furniture, reward them for it. All right, so listen, the key is to address the problem right away. The key is you want to make sure that you're making the customer happy. And you just want to have a system for when a claim happens. Just deal with it and move on. All right? But don't leave anything uncovered. You deal with the customer, then you find out why it's happening, what the specifics are of, you know, what's being damaged. Is it negligence by a crew that just has no idea what they're doing, or is it specific item like in my case, the tabletops? We're having problems with those, so we trained them on that and that problem went away. And that all results into additional money for your company. Because if you're spending money on claims, that's less profit, Period. All right, so I told you that I saw one quarter of our profit and loss statements just high claims being paid out. What do you think happens when that goes away and we eliminate that? There's plenty of money left over to reward the movers. And there's plenty of extra profit left over too. Not to mention the happy customers, the positive reviews. All of that just accumulates to help build your business. All right, so follow these steps to resolve the claims. If you have any questions, leave me a comment below. Until next week. Go out there every single day. Profit in your business. Thrive in your life. I'll see you later. Hey, my friend, it's Louis. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Do me two favors. Number one, subscribe to this channel so that you continue to get updates every time I release new training for you. And number two, if you'd like to get ahead a little bit faster and become more profitable in your business, what I'd like to do is give you a copy of my 10 rules of a Profitable Moving Company. These are the same 10 rules that I applied in my business that helped me grow it into a market multimillion dollar nationwide company. Okay, so all you need to do is click on the link on this page or head over to LewisMassaro.com tenrules so that's Lewis L O U I S Massaro M A s s a r-o.com 10rules. Just put in your name and email address and I'll email you out a copy. Okay? Until then, every single day, go out and profit in business and thrive in life. I'll see you later.