A good friend of mine came to me with a fairly common problem at one point, and I figured it is worth addressing in a public forum. She was attempting to put together her Village Auto Insurance claims after an offending driver totaled her parked car. She was having trouble getting through to the company in a timely fashion, as well as making her claims clear, and of course, getting any follow up.

While I cannot speak against Village Insurance, as there are many many similarly named auto insurance companies across the fifty United States, and in fact I do not even know what particular insurance company she is with, I can give a little bit of sound advice about this problem in general.

When you do your car insurance shopping, you do not only want to buy a policy that offers low monthly payments and good coverage. Obviously, both those attributes are incredibly attractive. Alluring, in fact. But if customer service is the pits, then whether you are the delinquent driver or someone else has damaged your car, you will be in a pretty sticky situation. Getting your claims through and seeing effective results may take ages. In fact, a common problem is for people to simply “give up” on getting damages straightened out because their insurance company was so difficult to deal with. So, make sure you get good reports about the company’s customer service before signing a policy with them! You will be doing yourself a priceless favor.

But once you have already gotten into an accident, it’s important to follow through with auto insurance claims. While it might be an enormous hassle, you don’t want to just give up. For one thing, you’ll be losing out on money, but also, if the onus of the accident is put on you as a result of your giving up on the claim, you could be face with elevated insurance rates in the future.