Newsletter - Down to Business

January 2006

Brought to you by Freds Insurance Incorp

Take Care in Providing Employee References

When considering hiring a new employee, the prospective employer reasonably wants to know something about that individual's track record. A resumé can tell a prospective employer a lot, but many hiring employers also want to talk with the individual's former employers, and will ask for employment references. Increasingly, however, employers are hesitant to talk about their former employees, for fear of opening themselves up to legal action for providing allegedly false, misleading or defamatory information.
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Decrease Your Product Liability Exposure Through Customer Service

There's an old saying: “You can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time.” These words should become the founda-tion for any product manufacturer's customer service policy - be ready to handle customer complaints because you will always have them. That means at the very least, you have a written complaint filing procedure and someone who is designated to follow it through to resolution.
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Experience Modification Ratings Do Not Have to Adversely Affect You

If you are an employer who has received an experience modification rating, it is imperative that you understand how it affects your workers' compensation premium calculations to make your rating work in your favor. Workers' compensation coverage is known as a class rated insurance program. That means that an insurance company gives all employers within a state who fall into a given industry or class the same rate. This is an average rate which doesn't take into consideration any individual characteristics of the employer. Since policy premiums are affected by the individual factors surrounding the business, carriers need a statistical method of differentiating one business in a given class from another. This is what an experience rating offers.
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