Claims Adjuster
In general, claims adjusters are those that investigate insurance claims. According to Wikipedia.com, a claim adjuster explores insurance claims, scrutinizes claimant and witnesses, consults police and hospital records, and inspects property damages in order to determine the extent of the company’s liability. This entire process can take between a few days to couple of months, and most of it is conducted via interviews.
Claims adjusters are considered to be the experts, who have the knowledge to complete the preparation of a property damage claim which, to an innocent homeowner or company owner, may be unknown territory. The documents contain technical terms such as depreciation, replacement costs, actual cash value, and others that may be unknown to the policyholder and a trained claims adjuster can ensure a correct completion.
In addition, a claims adjuster would consider costs that may not be apparent on the surface. These costs could include loss of productivity, loss of software development time, loss of labor, loss of physical property, and so on.
To add to this, a claims adjuster would be able to determine the benefits of replacing damaged physical equipment vs. repairing the same damaged equipment. These claim adjusters usually are like forensic accountants that give a dollar value to every aspect of damage, in order to file a claim with appropriate information and documents.
Insurance claims adjusters work for either an insurance company or an insured party in order to appraise and negotiate an insurance claim. A public claim adjuster exclusively represents the insured party, the staff adjuster and the independent insurance claim adjuster is employed by the insurance agency.