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    BUSINESS BURGLARY INSURANCE CLAIMS

    Arriving at your shop or office only to discover that it’s been burgled is, to say the least, a very traumatic experience. Fortunately, you’re well prepared. You have a solid insurance policy covering your livelihood against such eventualities. You’ve paid your premiums on time, year after year. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the ensuing insurance claim you’re about to make will more often than not be fraught with so many difficulties that the stress of the burglary will appear a mere trifle by comparison.

    So often the written statement that insurance loss adjusters demand of you regarding the circumstances of the burglary leaves you, the innocent victim, feeling like the criminal rather than the victim. The onus of proving ownership and its value will always rest with you, and if you don’t have the receipts and valuations to back up your claim, then there is every possibility that your Insurers will not pay you out.

    At Salmon Assessors, it’s simple; we guarantee to get you every single penny you are due. No win, no fee.

    OUR BUSINESS BURGLARY CLAIM SERVICES

    Fully Managed Burglary Claims

    Burglary claims require expert management from start to finish. Your insurance company will employ a Loss Adjuster whose sole purpose is to build a case against your claim.

    By employing an expert Loss Assessor to fight your corner. You can focus on doing what you do best while we do what we do best.

    Contact our expert assessors now.

    Under-Insurance

    Your insurers will do all in their power to find ways to pay you less than you are owed. A very typical method used is something called “Averaging”, they try to prove that you do not have sufficient cover, which allows them to pay a small fraction of what you could get.

    It is of the utmost importance that a Loss Assessor is employed as early as possible to ensure the maximum settlement.

    Contact our expert assessors now.

    No Win No Fee Burglary Claims

    We work on a total ‘no win, no fee’ basis. Our fees are based on a small percentage of the total settlement figure so it is in our mutual interest to ensure we achieve the maximum settlement on your behalf.

    Our initial consultation is undertaken without any obligation or charge whatsoever.

    Contact our expert assessors now.

    Highest Settlement

    We are regarded as the leading loss assessors in the industry and have over 30-years of successful trading history to show for it. A huge part of the work we get comes from repeat business or recommendation.

    There is no other loss assessor that will be able to get you more than Salmon Assessors.

    Contact our expert assessors now.

    Settled Quickly and Efficiently

    We receive countless enquiries from potential clients with claims that have been dragging on for months and months (sometimes years).

    By employing Salmon Assessors, you can rest assure that your claim will be presented and settled in the quickest time possible. We will never let the insurance company delay.

    Contact our expert assessors now.

    Insurance Experts

    Insurance companies will always try to bend the rules if it favours giving you the smallest possible payout.

    Our expertise is vital in stopping insurers ‘pulling the wool over our clients’ eyes. There are always new rules and regulations set to help the policyholder, and our job is to make sure they are put in place.

    Contact our expert assessors now.

    PEACE OF MIND.

    WE DO WHAT WE DO BEST, SO YOU CAN DO WHAT YOU DO BEST.

    ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT BURGLARY CLAIMS

    Your insurance company will instruct a firm of Loss Adjusters to act on their behalf. While the adjuster will insist upon being independent and impartial on the matter, the reality says otherwise. The firm is being paid by the insurance company and is there to represent their best interests. As far as the insurers are concerned, the loss adjuster doing a good job means reducing the final settlement as much as possible and, ideally, enabling them to decline cover entirely.

    Even in situations where you stand a good chance of eventually receiving the settlement, you’re entitled to, the proverbial obstacle course you’ll have to navigate is a daunting and demoralising one. You’ll be bombarded with a barrage of seemingly irrelevant questions about the crime over various meetings and will have to produce pages worth of schedules of stolen items and statements. And that’s not the end of it. Quite frequently, if you cannot produce substantiating evidence for all of the claimed items, the adjuster will try to decline cover for them or at least substantially reduce the payout. Even where you have the best of proofs, there still may be attempts to cast further doubt on the matter.

    Of course, in home burglaries, there are other losses that go beyond the mere cost of the stolen goods, namely the financial consequences for your business. Although the premises may be intact, without crucial business items you will not be returning to “business as usual” anytime soon. You will have to claim for these financial losses and, once again, particularly in the current economic climate your insurers will seek out every avenue that may enable them to accuse you of failing to comply fully with the policy and to repudiate your claim.

    As Loss Assessors, our function is to represent your best interests. We are experts in claim negotiation and can ensure that you get the very best settlement possible under your policy. We will manage your entire claim from start to finish, taking all of the stress and burdens away from you and ensuring the claim is not put in jeopardy due to one or two simple errors.

    We work on a “no win – no fee” basis in which our fee is calculated as a percentage of your final settlement. This means that negotiating a bigger settlement for you equates to a bigger payment for us. There could be no better incentive to do the very best job for you that we possibly can. We’re on your side.

    FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

    In the unlikely event that you haven’t done so already, please telephone the local police and request a crime reference number. This is vital and will be requested by your insurers. Then contact a locksmith or glazier to secure the point of intruder entry.

    Quite obviously, you are very unlikely to be able to make a full and comprehensive list of all the items that have been stolen from your workplace and this is something you must make very clear on any small schedule of the main items that have been stolen that this is simply a temporary list pending your staff conducting a full stock check.

    It is not a rare occurrence when we find that factory/shop/office victims of burglary are far too quick to pass the police or their insurers what they believe to be a total list of everything that has been stolen without giving any explanation that the schedule had been drawn up in a rush without having made a detailed stock check. It can often take a week or two (sometimes more) to discover other unobvious items that were stolen and when these extra items are sent to the police your insurers treat your burglary claim as suspect. When the Loss Adjuster does feel that a theft claim is worthy of further “forensic examination/investigation” by their specialist teams, this will have a great and ominous effect in the subsequent administration of the claim. At the risk of repetition, all of this could have been avoided by simply writing those few words, “This is a temporary list of those items that we can immediately see have been stolen and will be subject to a complete inventory after we have carried out a full stock check”.

    Telephone your insurance company and get the name of the person you speak to in their claims department and ask them for a reference number. They will confirm that if the claim is large enough they will be instructing a Loss Adjuster to contact you in due course. This is the ideal time to instruct a Loss Assessor (we hope, us!). We will then telephone the Loss Adjusters directly and hopefully get them to visit your shop/factory/offices far quicker than if you had telephoned them yourself. Please note that our meeting you before you meet the Insurance Company’s representative is not absolutely essential but ideally, we like to be at the first meeting with the adjusters at your workplace to initially discuss the burglary claim.

    Please be mindful that it is essential that you inform the police and your insurers within hours of finding out you have been burgled. Insurance companies can, and often do, repudiate a claim if they feel that they have not been notified in good time.

    The first thing we will do upon arrival is to discuss the method by which the perpetrators gained entry to the premises. By way of example, if the perpetrators forced their way into the building and you have a policy that demands that you have burglar alarm which you haven’t yet installed, then do not expect your theft claim to be paid. Similarly, if you are waiting for a maintenance visit from your burglar alarm company because the unit is not working correctly and the burglars got in without any alarm going off, once again, it is very unlikely that your claim will be paid.

    You don’t, we do! Our function is to make an easily and acceptable formatted Schedule of everything that you have had stolen. We check the Schedule twice before sending it to you for final signature and then we forward it to the Loss Adjuster. More often than not, because Loss Adjusters have a very heavy workload dealing with a lot of very small claims (we only handle claims of £10,000 or more) they tend to take an age to get back to you with an offer. Because we are dealing with Loss Adjusters every day of the week, we are often able to cut through the “red tape” and dramatically shorten the wait for payment.

    So long as you are not very under-insured, we are likely to get payment for everything you have had stolen. However, and importantly, this is all down to getting the correct valuations.

    Don’t think for a second that the Loss Adjuster is simply going to pay you out on your opinion of the valuation of something that, because it’s been stolen, cannot be seen and inspected. This is where Salmon Assessors come in very handy because we have our own in-house valuation team and, more often than not, our valuations are accepted by the Loss Adjusters as accurate. There’s a reason for this. Over 35 years Salmon Assessors have gained a reputation for professionalism amongst insurance companies and Loss Adjusters which helps us in our negotiations on your behalf.

    Good question, and we hope an equally good answer. There’s a lovely old saying that goes, “The strongest doesn’t always win the fight and the fastest doesn’t always win the race, but that’s where the smart money goes”. In short, we do not do anything other than negotiate insurance claims. We don’t sell insurance. We are simply master insurance claim negotiators… nothing more and nothing less. It is important to understand that your own insurance company is employing third party insurance claim experts, i.e. the Loss Adjusters, to negotiate any large claim on their behalf. And the reason? It’s because the insurance company does not hold itself out to be a claim negotiator. In much the same way, you, the claimant, would be considered very unlucky indeed if you had to make more than two or three large claims in a lifetime. We, as insurance Loss Assessors, handle 10 or more new and large commercial burglary claims every couple of weeks and our experience is second to none. We know our way around the insurance claims industry very well and, in much the same way that the Loss Adjuster is, it could be said, being paid to reduce your claim on behalf of your insurers, we are doing everything possible to get you the highest possible settlement. You would not dream of going to court to defend yourself without a Solicitor, and we hope that you will agree that something as important as a large insurance claim should be treated in expert hands on your behalf, just like the insurance company are leaving it to their experts. (Isn’t it strange how the vast majority of insurance claims are worth far more than minor court claims but one seeks expert representation for the minor court claim but, more often than not, does not seek expert representation to help them get the largest possible settlement). Please, do not make the misguided mistake of thinking that the Loss Adjuster has been sent to help you by your insurers. He hasn’t. He is there to represent their interests and to ensure that the extent of their liability is restricted by clever negotiation.

    Certainly, our repeat clients (and 60-70% of our clients are either repeat or recommendations) would not use us if we achieved a lower settlement than they could get themselves! The fact remains that if we achieved much the same as you could get yourself, we could argue that the time we have spent handling and negotiating the claim leaving you to do what you are best at is good value in itself. However, we know for a fact that we are able to achieve an average in the order of 20-30% more than you as a non-insurance claim expert would be able to achieve yourself and as we have said previously, we are totally incentivised by how much we can get you. The more we get for you, the more we take from you and the quicker we get your money, the quicker we get paid! We assure you that there could not be a better incentive for us to ensure you are paid to the absolute maximum. We make no apologies when we describe ourselves as “mercenaries inhabiting the world of insurance”. In fact, it was the London Evening Standard that described us in this manner and, we are pleased to say, in a complimentary way!

    Certainly, some of the larger insurance brokers do have a Claims Department. However, please understand that the role of an Insurance Broker is to get you the best quality, all-encompassing insurance policy at the keenest possible price. That’s how they earn their money. Certainly, they will help you with your commercial burglary insurance claim to the best of their ability in the limited time that they have available for what for them is a non-profit making activity. It may interest you to learn that 65-70% of our business is actually referred to us by insurance brokers. We hope we have made our case.

    We charge a small percentage of the claim total and this is dependent on our estimation of the size of the claim. What we can say, is that it is a very rare instance indeed where we are not able to negotiate a far higher settlement than you can yourself. We haven’t been around for 35 years because we get people less than they can get themselves! Think of us as mercenaries (but nice ones!) The more we get you, the more we will charge you and the quicker we get your claim settled the quicker we will be paid. We assure you that there could be no better incentive for us to ensure you are paid to the absolute maximum.

    Even if we have not been instructed at the start of the claim, we are still prepared to help you get a better settlement. However, our fee structure is different and instead of charging you a small percentage of the total claim we will charge you a higher percentage but only on any difference that we achieve. In passing, it is a rare instance where we cannot get an extra payment from insurers.

    REQUEST A CALL BACK.

    Would you like to speak to one of our Loss Assessors? Just submit your details and we’ll be in touch shortly. You can also email us if you would prefer.

    Salmon Assessors, Room 2, The Summit, 40 Highgate West Hill, London N6 6LS