An Unregulated Industry And 10s All Around
On Time, Clean & Tidy, Polite Staff – A Happy Owner
Below Average Severity (Cost) – A Happy Bill Payer
Efficient Repairs and a Good Profit Margin – A Happy Shop Owner
Is the Car Safe and Next Accident Ready? – We Don’t Actually Measure That
There are a lot of cars being repaired and the insurance side of the industry has to have a standardized way of measuring the performance of the repairers. These standardized measurements are commonly referred to as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs.) In the insurer/ repairer world, the relationship is based almost completely on these numbers with the most important being severity (another word for cost), cycle time (how quickly was it done) and customer satisfaction.
Cost is easy to measure and the lower the better, the time it takes to repair the vehicle is also easy to measure with the quicker the better. But how is quality measured?
There Is Effectively No One Checking
It has improved somewhat since 2016, with progress being made but Quality of Repair scores are based very much on the vehicle owner’s response. The problem is that the vehicle owner is not qualified to answer questions about safe and correct repairs. They only see the clean shiny painted result and have no way of knowing how the structural repairs, which are not easily visible in the completed vehicle, were done. They may, or may not, notice an issue if the electronic safety and driver assist systems of the car are not properly verified and calibrated.
If there is no licensing of technicians and no physical inspection of the repair then it is left entirely to the integrity of the repair facility to do the complete correct repair. There is effectively no one checking.
Billing for a correct repair will be accepted and paid but so will billing for an incorrect repair and the correct repair will not improve the rating that the repairer receives from the insurance company. In fact, the correct repair will increase both severity and cycle time, with resulting lower scores.