SP
Sandra Price
Feb 4, 2026
I am not a spring chicken and I have worked with any number of insurance agents across my adult life. Only two stand out. One was a neighbor who is out of the insurance business these days. The other is Don Clements, who was a complete stranger. My parents are super old, as my mother would say as old as the dinosaurs. I had to sell my house and get a small place in Kansas City near my folks, and an even smaller place in my home state. Somebody in my home state office referred me to Don. I'm sure they had no sense of the Kansas City map, and Don's office was not near my part of town. I almost didn't go with him because his office is a 30-minute drive from me. Then I spoke with him on the phone. It was a complicated situation with condos in two states, but his patience and his desire to make it work for me sold me on him personally and I decided I didn't care how far away he was. As it turns out, that was an excellent decision. I have had three claims, all in Missouri, two homeowner claims, acts of nature (this is why people leave Missouri), and one auto claim (my own fault - because I am so short I did not see the giant rock in the Sutherland parking lot 😢).
But I digress. The first homeowner claim, an enormous tree that I'd actually paid to have trimmed so it would not fall on my house nevertheless fell. It took out my garage-top deck, opening my garage to the weather. It was a wild summer storm, lots of people were hit. A construction guy State Farm apparently hired to have extra hands on deck because their usual group of assessors was inadequate to the enormous task, came out to assess my damage. He was at my property for about 5 minutes, then disappeared off the face of the earth. I never got an estimate, and could not track down the assessor. I have my theory - that since he came from a construction company, he picked the biggest and the juiciest jobs and left the rest of us by the side of the road. Anyway, after months and months of struggling around to get this sorted out, I finally gave up and called Don. Somehow Don was able to get a hold of the right people and miraculously put the project back on track.
The problems I had around the auto claim really had more to do with timing than chaos. I was scheduled to drive from Missouri back to my home state for work, but there were several obstacles to getting the work done, none of which had to do with State Farm. Nevertheless I called my trusty agent, and April, on Don's staff, somehow managed to turn the situation around.
My latest claim, which I am still in the middle of, is five burst pipes in my new home in Kansas City, after 7°F weather overloaded and shut down my furnace. I was out of town when this happened, but the development facilities guy saw the water running down the street, tracked it back to my condo and called me right away. Once again, April to the rescue. She directed me to Servpro, and they were at my house within an hour. There have been very few glitches, but if it happens, I am just going straight to Don Clement's office.
I have to admit that during the tree-falling-on-garage chaos (if a tree falls on your garage and nobody is there to assess it, did it really happen?) I thought about changing insurance companies. But they are all enormous, and you could have a bureaucratic experience with any of them. In the end what really matters is having a person inside, who is accessible, cares and doesn't think their job is over once they've sold the policy. That is Don, April and Don's office.