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Collision Industry Conference debates alternatives to initial estimate writing |
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Tuesday, 01 May 2007 |
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Roger Wright, manager of material damage and direct repair programs for AIG, said he virtually had such a program in place a dozen years ago when he was with another insurance company.
“I built a partnership with a collision repair shop group and I said, ‘Fix the car and send me a bill, and fix the car like you are fixing it for your mother using your money,’” Wright said. “I felt very comfortable with that, and it worked great. Now we had some arm’s length auditing to manage it. And we had some outliers who wouldn’t behave well. But I didn’t have to have 100 people on the street; I only had to have 12.”
Wright said, however, that less than 20 percent of that insurer’s work at that time was going through its direct repair program so he still needed initial estimates in 80 percent of claims. But, he said, most insurers know what they need to put into reserves on average for each claim, so the initial estimate is certainly not something insurers need for that aspect of their business.
Others at CIC pointed out that the initial estimate is needed for the customer to know what will be done for the car, and to generate the work order that is given to the technicians.
But Biggs countered that today’s estimates are so full of abbreviations and “gibberish” that the average consumer can’t read them anyway, nor are they always complete and accurate enough to give technicians all the information they need.
“The estimate is a negotiating item, and we’re lying to ourselves if we say that (it) is an exact blueprint for repairs,” Biggs said. “And I’m not suggesting that you …replace the databases and arbitrarily pick $300 or $3,000 out of the air. But we could get there faster, easier and less expensively and then have less minutia to argue about, and get to the job of fixing cars. You can’t say, ‘We don’t pay for that,’ if there isn’t ‘that’ on the estimate.”
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