HSA Home Warranty Responds to Criticism
Home warranty companies take lot of heat from consumers especially on reviews sites like ours. Consumers think home warranty plans provide blanket coverage just like auto insurance. But these are different kinds of insurance products. Chances of your appliances needing repair are much more than your car getting involved in a road accident, although premium you pay is about the same. So, obviously insurance companies have to make some profit to stay alive and that is why there are small print clauses that exclude certain conditions. Not many people will read the contract and will be surprised when their claims are rejected. As pointed out by Mr. Lehmann below, positive experiences are less likely to be talked about and many reviews here on this site are overly negative.
The president and CEO of HSA Home Warranty has responded to the criticism and negative reviews on this site. We appreciate home warranty companies coming out and explaining the facts. We also think they need to ensure home owners understand the product terms before signing the contract. Homeowners warranty is one of those products that needs little bit of consumer education.
Here is the complete response –
I feel that I have to respond to the comments that I read on this blog. I have been the president of this company for 25 years. It disturbs me to read these comments when I know that we work so diligently to deliver the best service that we possibly can. Unfortunately, the individuals who post their opinions are overwhelmingly those that feel that they were treated unfairly. I think that some statistics might be helpful to those individuals who read this site. We have 100 opinions posted on this site. Of those, approximately 25 are people who had a good experience and wish to share it. All others express negative comments. This is out of almost 85,000 people who filed claims with us last year. So you are hearing from far less than 1% of our claimants on this site. What you don’t hear is from the 85% plus who had claims and were very satisfied.
Furthermore, over 40% of our business comes from renewal customers who thought highly enough of our product and service to renew their warranty coverage. In other words a huge majority of our customers are very satisfied with their coverage and keep their warranty coverage with us for a long period of time.
While I applaud the high satisfaction rates of some of our competitors, you might notice that they do not have very many opinions registered. That is possibly because they only conduct business in a single community or state. The national companies, like HSA, have a more challenging situation in that they cover the entire country from Fargo, ND, to Abilene, TX to Philadelphia, PA to Orlando Florida. It is a tremendous challenge to form a network of vendors that covers the entire country. With this challenge comes some variance in the quality of service contractors performing the repairs. We do our best, every day, to bring on high quality service people. However, the alternative is no warranty protection if your community is smaller, more rural, or difficult to access.
There are those who complain that they had to wait several days in high heat or extreme cold to have their furnace or air conditioner repaired or replaced. If you look in your yellow pages you may notice that there are a finite number of companies who do this work. When there is a heat spike or a heavy freeze they are under tremendous pressure to accomplish all of the repairs. Whether you have a home warranty or not, it is likely that you will have to wait to get your repair work done. In fact, we believe that we do get repair people to you faster than if you did not have a warranty, because we send these companies a lot of business and have service contracts in place to establish high expectations with our service people.
Further, if you need a rare part or a new unit, we might be able to get them faster than the local company because we often buy directly from the manufacturer. Still there are only so many service companies and it takes time to get to you when there are weather extremes in your area. We also have a service guaranty in our contract that ensures we will respond to your service request in a timely manner or we will let you contact a vendor outside of our network to ensure fast service. Our people do their very best to bring you the fastest service possible. It is in our best interest to have satisfied customers.
Our CSR’s are monitored and trained on a daily basis. All telephone calls are recorded. We review these for quality assurance purposes and if there is a complaint about “rudeness” we listen to the call and review it with the CSR. As we review these we frequently find that the “rudeness” may have occurred after a customer became irate, abusive or profane with the CSR. We do instruct them to end the call if they are subject to extremely abusive language or profanity. The CSR’s are nearly always friendly, courteous and helpful. If not, they are retrained. If that is unsuccessful, further corrective action is taken up to and including termination.
With this response I pledge that all complaints about our service surfaced on this site will be fully reviewed to be sure the proper claim decision was made. While there are times when customers are upset that our contract terms do not allow us to cover every claim, I am confident that we stand by our service experience and address problems as they arise.
Some customers complain about being non-renewed after a claim. On average, we pay 1.1 claims per contract. That’s our business. We pay claims and provide service to people. However, you may have seen allusions to receiving $10,000 in claims. Obviously we cannot pay that kind of money out on every warranty. These individuals usually have eight to twenty claims. If we did renew this type of property, the cost of the warranty would be raised very high for everyone else and make the product less available to consumers who need the budget protection our warranty provides. We also will non-renew for persistent abusive or profane language and for behavior we consider unethical. Just as you have the choice of warranty providers, we have the ability to choose not to do business with individuals who exhibit this type of behavior.
Some complaints are about hold times. We continually strive to improve our hold times. In these economic times longer hold times are a problem. You may have experienced them with airlines, banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, etc. We are actually pleased that we have been able to keep the standards that we have and even improve our hold times in several target areas. We have not moved to a foreign call center or outsourced our call center operation. All of your calls are answered here in the United States by HSA employees trained in the values of our organization. They take tremendous pride in providing you industry leading customer service.
I wrote this letter because I could not tolerate without response the people who call us thieves, liars and con men. We work very hard to deliver the best service and coverage that we can with integrity and fairness, and have done so for 25 years. We judge our success by the number of people who renew their warranty coverage with us year after year. These are the more than 85 percent of our customers who file a legitimate service request and receive fair and prompt service. If that were not true we could not keep our customers.
Robert Lehmann – CEO & President of HSA Home Warranty
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December 7, 2009
Upset and angry. I purchased this home warranty four months ago thinking it was the best decision to make at the time of purchasing a bigger home for the growing family. Boy, I feel so wrong right now. The garage door has decided not to close since last night and I decided to contact HSA for assistance. We received a call today and the representative told us they could not help us due to the garage door not meeting current safety standards. WHAT?
Recently bought a house and decided to get the warranty from HSA. Had the furnace tuned up from a local company, I figured it probably needed to be done. They replaced the ignitor while they were here. Two weeks go by and I have no heat. HSA says you have to call them first!!! They send out this joke of a company the guy arrives here and says well that’ll be $95 call your local company and tell them they need to replace your ignitor. GRRR!!! Then like Michelle my garage door opener goes out. I file a claim online because the hold times were approaching 10+ minutes. Overhead Door Company comes out looks at opener says it’s so old they cant get parts for it. Call HSA, “it doesnt have the sensors at the bottom of the door we arent covering it. OK thanks, and as if it werent bad enough not even a week goes by and the furnace stops again. I call HSA and tell them the heat is out I dont want your Crap company you sent out here the last time I am going with nice local company. They say ok, tech shows up on a Saturday, replaces inducer motor $303, Pressure switch $69.54 Sat fee $52.50 1 hr labor $120.00 Total w/tax $572.84 Ok I paid for this out of my pocket because I went with my own company. I get a call on Monday broad says hi sir we are only approving approx $220 because we never authorized tech out on a saturday and we could get the part from Carrier for $220 ok, So its 7+ outside and you wanted me to wait till you ordered the part in from the manufacturer. Well yes sir. Actually we need you to fax your receipt so we can issue you a check. Yeah stay away from HSA they dont cover anything!!! They asked the HVAC guy if it was due to normal wear and tear. Ummmm what isnt its mechanical the stuff goes, I wont recommend this company ever!!!!!!!
Robert – I understand that you are saying only a small portion of the people with claims have actually posted on this site. However, look at the fact that 75% of those people have had an issue with your so-called diligent company. Have you yourself ever tried to call in and deal with one of your customer service agents? Have you actually ever had repair work done by one of the inadequate contractors? Have you ever had to call in multiple claims for the same problem and been called a liar by the customer service agents? Probably not.
This site is telling you how your company is actually perceived. We don’t care what you see from the corporate suite. I worked in customer service for 10 years and I guarantee I treated the worst customers better than I get treated by your staff on a normal day. Of course customers tend to get irate on the phone, especially when we’re being told that we have to pay that deductible yet again because the problem wasn’t documented correctly in your system.
For example, I was told today that there was no documentation of Dial One being at my house prior to a repair by another company and no documentation that the heat was on in the summer. Unfortunately, I have told ever single person I have talked to in the past 2 months (which is probably 7 or 9) and the people I talked to back in July that this was the case. However, your documentation doesn’t show that, so I lose.
Sir, you are thieves, liars, and con men. You force us to use your companies that (I believe) do inadequate work to ensure more work and more deductibles. If they had done the work properly the first time, I wouldn’t have had to file more than one claim this year and I wouldn’t be on this site.
I have already contacted the Better Business Bureau about your company and the company that inadequately repaired (using that term loosely since it’s broken again) my furnance. I encourage others to do the same at http://www.bbb.com.
ERIN CLAPP IS RIGHT HSA ARE THIEVES!
ALMOST THE SAME THING HAPPENED TO ME – MY FURNACE HAS NOW HAS TO BEEN “FIXED” 5 TIMES. THEY OBVIOUSLY CONTRACT WITH LOW-QUALITY CONTRACTORS OR -ARE IN LEAGUE WITH THEM .
I don’t mean to sound paranoid here, but, on a number of occasions (now 3 times to fix the same problem), i have had to pay $200+ to either pay “overtime” (on weekends when i can actually be home) or for other “non-covered” services