PALO ALTO, CA — While a majority of us have been spending a lot of time at home to avoid spreading the coronavirus, if you’re a homeowner, you may have started to see a few little fixes around that house that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. A chief insurance officer says taking care of those little fixes now, could save you a lot of money down the road, and his insurance company is trying to help.
“The reality is nobody really wants to have an insurance claim, and so at Hippo, or philosophy is quite simple: if we can do anything to avoid the claim, instead of having it, that’s important to you, that’s important to us - the best claims experience is not having a claim at all,” Rick L. McCathron, Chief Insurance Officer for Hippo Insurance told 104.7 WONK FM’s Jen Richer
McCathron said Hippo is working with customers to focus on maintenance issues, before they become full-blown repairs. He said the most common claims for homeowner’s insurance involve water inside the home.
“Something that used to happen a lot is you’d wake up in the morning and you’d walk out into your kitchen from your laundry room and you’d have two inches of water on the floor because nobody had any kind of protective smart home devices,” McCathron explained. “Now your cell phone will ping at you at 2:00 o’clock in the morning and say there’s a leak in your laundry room, and you look at it, and you see a little trickle, it’s just a trickle at this point, you turn the water off, you give us a call, we walk you through the repair and it’s well taken care of. Now you’ve got a mop and hose repair instead of a waking up to a $20,000 dollar water claim and a deductible that might be $2,500 dollars.”
While the precautions taken under COVID-19 may have some of us rethinking inviting and expert in to take a look, Hippo is offering remote home repairs through Hippo Home Care.
“At Hippo we’ve developed a tremendous amount of smart home technology, things that help protect you. We even have a virtual care assistant that will help you get this stuff installed, making sure your home is well taken care of, so that claim never happens,” he said. “We walk you through the process of installation virtually, we have you identify things on your phone… we tell you where to point, and we take a look at it, and make sure you’re well taken care of.”
Founded in 2015, Hippo Insurance prides itself on keeping the client as the focus of their business ethos.
“Hippo is a really proactive provider of homeowner’s insurance, along with what we have, Hippo Home-care, which provides proactive home-care services for our customers in the event of need,” McCathron said.
For more information on Hippo Insurance and Hippo Home Care visit their website: hippo.com
Listen Rick L. McCathron's interview with Jen Richer here:
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