By Tom Davis
Newport Beach, California — October 13, 2017 — The latest Guild 21 conference call aimed to create a conversation on how to improve the relationship between shops and insurers in regards to direct repair programs (DRPs). The guest was George Avery, formerly of State Farm, and now an independent consultant.
Avery, who began his career as a technician and painter before joining State Farm, opened the teleconference by introducing the audience to the presentation and how it will focus on building a conversation between shop owners and insurers to better improve the efficiency of DRP practices and how each program can vary from the next.
A statement from Guild 21 says it has been working on surveying shops on how administration related to DRPs can be made more efficient.
Speaking of the surveys, Avery said: “We’re not saying the way that DRP programs work right now are bad, but we want to start a conversation with both shop owners and insurers on how we can improve administrative tasks and find some easy solutions.”
The research aims to identify common and inconsistent administrative practices between DRPs that could result in inefficiencies in the repair process that could impact the performance of a shop. The survey will take into account the number of repairs a shop does each month, and the number of DRP relationships it has as a result.
Questions look at administration tasks, such as how many photos are required by each DRP on a collision loss, and then compared to the bodyshops prefferred number of photos for that particular claim.
“The intent of the data we find through these surveys is not to ruffle feathers. We want to explore ways in which we can be more efficient in DRP practices. Not only will this improve the customer experience, but it will increase efficiency for bodyshops. Hopefully these surveys will allow us to start having some conversations with insurers about how the administration can be improved for both sides,” said Avery.
Some of the results from the surveys were published during the second half of the call. Highlights included that 40 to 50 percent of shop owners preferred to have a DRP appointment scheduled over the phone; 60 percent prefer to upload the original repair estimate after the repair plan and 63 percent said their preferred number of photos for collision loss is between five and 10.
For more information on the Guild 21 conference calls is available at verifactsauto.com/guild-21.
