Golfball-sized hail leads to giant-sized service

Missouri Farm Bureau Insurance agency sales manager Justin and his staff were eating lunch at a local diner one balmy May afternoon when a storm rolled through town. "We didn’t think much of it," he remembers. "It was a normal storm on our end of town." But then one of his customer-service reps hustled into the diner with reports from the other side of town. "I remember him saying, 'It's bad.'"

The rep's description of the storm included a phrase that everyone often hears but few are unlucky enough to experience. It's a phrase that can fill insurance agents with a certain sort of dread.

"Golfball-sized hail."

An agent with more than four years of experience under his belt, Justin thought he knew what his office could expect that afternoon. A hail storm doesn't happen in isolation. If a single car is damaged by hail, chances are dozens, if not hundreds, of people and vehicles will be affected. So Justin and his crew abandoned lunch and beelined back to the office. And that was a good thing, because his office filed nearly 200 claims that afternoon.

When drivers get auto insurance, they're usually doing it to protect themselves and others in case of an accident. They don't consider the vast number of ways insurance can help them out of jams. They don't anticipate events that can leave their cherished vehicles resembling golfballs, or worse. This storm leaned heavily on the side of "or worse."

"I was shocked by the damage," Justin remembers. "We had clients pulling in with holes through their vehicles, badly dented body panels. I didn't know hail could do that. I'd guess that one in ten cars were totaled that day."

The initial barrage of customer claims was just the beginning. People need their cars, and they need them with little or no interruption. And that means that they need their insurance agencies to be responsive so they can get back on the road and back to their lives.

The claims kept coming the next day and the next. To service each and every client as quickly as possible that week, the Missouri Farm Bureau Insurance home office sent several claims reps to Justin's office so that they could weather the storm's aftermath together. "We set up a drive-through claim system so clients could just pull in and leave with a check," Justin says. "We didn't want our clients to have to wait on estimates, or talk to body shops before they got the process rolling." The system worked; the typical customer those days didn't wait more than five or ten minutes.

In one case, a mother rolled up with her back window smashed in. Glass was scattered throughout the vehicle's interior, including over her two car seats. "We told her, 'Go get some car seats. Here's a check.'"

For the vast majority of clients serviced by Justin and company that week, this was their first experience with non-collision damage. "They weren't just looking to file claims," Justin says. "They were looking for guidance. What to do next, where to do it. I'm glad that we were there to offer it."

"It makes me feel good knowing that Missouri Farm Bureau Insurance cares enough about all its clients to act quickly like that." View all stories