The claim, from your first phone call
Most people call us before they call their insurance, and that order works fine. Tell us what happened and send photos, and you get the real repair number to weigh against your deductible before a claim exists at all. When the damage sits close to the deductible we say so — filing to recover a few hundred dollars is rarely worth what it does to your file.
If you are filing, open the claim through your insurance company’s app, website, or the number on your insurance card, and name Prime Auto Body in Savage as the shop. That one sentence is all it takes. From there we take over the correspondence: claim number, photographs, the estimate, adjuster scheduling, and approvals. What you do afterward is answer the phone when a decision is genuinely yours to make. The rest is paperwork we are set up for and you are not.
Meeting the adjuster at our shop
An adjuster inspecting your car in our bay, with the damaged area already apart, writes a more accurate estimate than one working in a parking lot at a drive-in claims center. Brackets, absorbers, and mounting points are visible, and the conversation is about what is in front of both of us rather than what a photograph suggests. It also removes a round trip: an estimate written on an assembled car normally has to be revised once the shop opens it up, and every revision is another approval sitting in a queue.
You do not need to be there for it. We walk the damage with the adjuster, hand over the teardown photographs and the line-item repair plan, and call you with what was agreed. When the adjuster and our estimator are looking at the same thing, approval usually happens on that visit. If a line is disputed you get the specifics — which item, what the objection was, and what we intend to do about it — rather than a vague note that the claim is still under review.
- Claim opened with your insurance company and the file pointed at our shop
- Teardown completed and photographed before the inspection
- Adjuster meets the vehicle here, already apart, not in a parking lot
- Line-item repair plan handed over with supporting photographs
- Supplements filed and tracked until they are approved
Supplements, disagreements, and your rights
A supplement is the formal request to add operations or parts a first estimate missed, and it is routine rather than adversarial. We file it with photographs of the damage in place, part numbers, and the labor operations required. Most are approved on the documentation. When one is not, approved work keeps moving in the meantime, so the disagreement costs you hours instead of weeks.
You keep two rights worth remembering. Minnesota Statute § 72A.201 forbids an insurance company from requiring a particular shop or pressuring you toward one, and state law requires your vehicle be restored to pre-accident condition with parts of like kind and quality. Saying "I have chosen Prime Auto Body in Savage, please send the adjuster there" ends the steering conversation almost every time. If it does not, note the date and the exact words — that is the record the Department of Commerce would want to see.
