State Farm

Last week I got a renewal doc­u­ment from GEICO for my car’s insur­ance despite it not expir­ing for another few months. This set me off to research alter­na­tives as I’m fairly sure I can save money in that arena next time around. Pro­gres­sive has an office near work so I was look­ing into them, I did a Con­sumer Reports lookup on car insur­ance com­pa­nies to see who has the best record as well as surf­ing Con­sumerist look­ing for red flags. Since I still have a few months I didn’t do any­thing other than get a quote or two.

Just yes­ter­day I get a plain enve­lope in the mail, open it to find a well writ­ten and some­what per­sonal feel­ing let­ter from a local State Farm agent. I get to the bot­tom and it’s got a printed sig­na­ture using an obvi­ous com­puter font.

I turned to K and said, “If only he had signed the letter.”

I am sure it was one let­ter in a mailer going out to thou­sands of car own­ers in Florida, but the effect a per­sonal sig­na­ture in blue ink would have had on the let­ter would have swayed me and made me much more eager to pos­si­bly switch to State Farm.

I guess the let­ter is bet­ter than the form let­ters I get from GEICO all the time try­ing to get my busi­ness (despite already being a GEICO cus­tomer) but I just wish he had gone that extra step and had a real signature.