Fight the Right Battles - Collision Repair Magazine

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Volume 6

Issue 1

Fight the Right Battles

Written by Jay Perry

Thursday, 11 October 2007

This industry is full of good people. I believe there are some pretty bad people in it too; being an optimist I prefer to associate with the positive ones and do my best to mitigate the influence of the others.
It is very important that we keep a balanced position when looking at the good ones in the industry too. Often I see good motives go astray with misguided actions. The intention is to do the right thing, which is good, but the actions end up hurting the business.

A case in point would be when some of our industry take up the fight for what is right for the consumer. Nothing wrong with
this on the surface. Dive deeper and you will find that these individuals are taking on a war that is not theirs to wage.

I see it day after day when a shop manager decides that what the insurer pays is what they have to settle for. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If a consumer has decided either out of a decision to save money or a decision to not investigate what their entitlements under insurance coverage is; that is their problem - not the shop’s.

In the U.S. it is a little more obvious as they have two distinct classes of insurance - standard and sub-standard. Here the distinction is a little less clear with many sub-standard insurance companies parading as if they were standard level services.

If a customer chooses sub-standard insurance coverage they are limiting the exposure for the insurance company and obligating themselves to pay the difference.

I can illustrate it clearly by pointing your attention to the size of a deductible. If your customer comes in and you find that they have a $2,000 deductible, do you feel it is necessary for you to pay the difference back down to a lower, more average deductible? Of course not! Nor should any shop feel obligated to absorb the difference in a reasonable posted door rate and “what the insurance company pays.”

To me that is the obligation of the insured. They received the benefit of lesser premiums throughout the coverage period in exchange for the obligation to pay the difference back to service provider’s regular rates. Why should you pay the difference?

I think as an industry we would do a lot better if we “stuck to our knitting” by repairing vehicles in a safe, courteous manner that makes our customers happy. The really smart insurance companies have started to realize that this is a good, long-term strategy to employ.

We could help ourselves by standing up for appropriate compensation. We could generate funds that would allow us to compete with any other professional trade for compensation, equip our shops with equipment and education for our staff, provide more consumer-comfort facilities, build long-term infrastructure that supports a new generation of technicians and get a decent ROI.

If we supported the companies with this attitude and left the others to their own devices we would be helping ourselves. Eventually they would have to come to the party with the right amount of money or they would go out of business.

The best are now positioning themselves to be on the right end of the receiving line for collision services. If we can help them by making it difficult for the sub-standards to do business then we can be the ones that are driving.

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