Dealing With Difficult People-Kill Them With Kindness Is The Best Policy—No Matter How Much It Hurts You

By John Armstrong
Being in business means dealing with people. Being involved in insurance claims means dealing with difficult people. Normal, good, decent people tend to be difficult or impossible when under stress. You and your company may be wrongly accused of all kinds of things. You may be threatened with lawsuits or worse. What to do? Turn the other cheek! Don’t given into the temptation to write about how you really feel to the claimant, in your claimants, or to anyone. If you really feel the need to do, write what you want to say on waste paper, and then shred your personal thoughts. While valid, they have no place in the insured’s claim file. 
Why? Well... I began my career defending insurance bad faith property cases arising out of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. The most difficult cases to defend where ones in which the claims adjuster wrote “less than nice things” about the insured.The lawyers armed with the claims correspondence all obtained recoveries and better ones, than where there wasn’t this added “bad fact” in defending the claim. (Of course only this information was only produced after valiant efforts were made to protect the claims file.) The sad part was that if you carefully reviewed the entire file, you understood where the adjuster was coming from. But all that anyone on a jury would be focused on would be the “bad”  comments by the adjuster.
From a juror’s perspective, the claims adjuster, as the insurer’s agent, has all the cards in his or her favor. The claimant has suffered a loss, and may be out thousands of dollars or more and may even have sustained permanent bodily injury from the event giving rise to the claim. In contrast, the claims adjuster’s stress “only” has to deal with fairly adjusting the loss. No doubt the adjuster must deal with the verbal and written threats by the insured and insured’s attorney. No doubt it its unpleasant. But adjusters are held to a higher level. They are expected to be professional at all time because, after all, claims is their profession. 
To illustrate what I’m writing about, I once had to defend a claimant who was also an attorney. I had to copy all of correspondence to the handling and senior claims adjuster and coverage counsel since there was such a high chance of the insured suing for bad faith. But not matter how nasty the multiple tomes of single-spaced emails I received every day, I always responded with kindness and professionalism. The result? We got the claim resolved, and when it was all over, the insured sent me a very nice and unexpected thank you. That is a much happier result than trying to defend your words once your company is sued for bad faith. The moral? Kill ‘em with kindness. It’ll save you and your employer countless headaches and plenty of $$$ in the long run.