Safelite Study of Auto Glass Insurance Claims Completed; Few Details about Study Available
March 22, 2011

Safelite AutoGlass recently commissioned a study to look at auto glass claims and their effect on policyholder retention, according to information provided by the company. The company had announced in January that it had contracted J.D. Power and Associates “to analyze how insurance customers handle and react to auto glass claims.”

While neither the details of the study, and how it was conducted—nor the full results of the study—have been made public, the company says the study found that insurance policyholders who experience a glass claim typically are more satisfied with their insurers than those that have not, and are 5.4 percent more likely than those who’ve not filed auto glass claims to renew their policies.

Safelite says those surveyed were asked to rate their insurers on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being the best) and found that policyholders who had filed an auto glass claim at some point rated their insurers with an average score of 8.38.

Meanwhile, those who had “not experienced an auto glass claim” rated their insurers with an average score of 7.95.

The company also looked at how policyholders rate their insurers when they’ve filed an auto glass claim and the work has been completed by Safelite—and reported the average score among those insureds was 9.05 for replacement customers, and 9.10 for repair customers.

“We measure our customer satisfaction through the Net Promoter Score method, and while we’ve consistently had high satisfaction scores from customers who would recommend our service, we wanted to verify this data with independent research,” says Pete Pearson, a senior vice president at Safelite.

Safelite officials have not made the full report available, and have only provided the results included in the press release. “We do not have a report beyond the press release [available to the media],” says company spokesperson Melina Metzger.

She adds, "Under the contract, the full report is to be shared with our insurance clients only.”

Metzger advised that 35,000 consumers were included in the survey.

“They were collected through a variety of ways – both using our data and the data from the research firm,” says Metzger. "They were compared to create one conclusion, [and] the results were merged for one set of findings."

J.D. Power and Associates was not named in the final press release announcing the results, and Metzger advised this was part of the contractual agreement made when the study was commissioned; she could not confirm that J.D. Powers ultimately completed the survey.

However, John Tews, director of media relations for J.D. Power and Associates, provided the following statement to glassBYTEs.com™/AGRR™ magazine regarding the study.

“Unfortunately we cannot provide [the details or methodology of the study],” says Tews. “That was not one of our syndicated studies, which means that it was not funded by us. It was a proprietary study, so we were commissioned by Safelite to conduct that study. As part of our contractual agreement all the results belong to Safelite, so we’re not contractually allowed to talk about the results.”

When Safelite had announced in January that the study would be conducted, senior vice president Pete Pearson had said that the company hoped the study would “help insurance companies understand how their policyholders make decisions about vehicle glass repair or replacement and how it affects their view of their insurance of choice.”

J.D. Powers also conducts its own annual study of insurance claims satisfaction in general, and results of that study are released each fall.

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