A number of current trends are putting shops at even greater risk. Four of these trends are particularly significant.
1. Rapidly improving marketing processes and techniques. Fueled by emerging technologies and insurance pressure to reduce severity, these new approaches demand everything from faster, more reliable repairs to intelligent guided estimating to paintless dent removal programs. However, they give shops that embrace them a significant advantage.
2. Major shifts in insurance DRP’s needs. Insurance company DRP business models, once safely ignored, are shifting. Shops providing advantages to insurance companies with the advanced capabilities needed to understand and respond to these changes are in demand. Networks that deliver “verified repair facilities” will be in command (the ASVRN).
3. Increasing customer demands. It is becoming more evident every day that customers are demanding more from collision markets. A strong commitment to customer loyalty must become a full-time, core competence required by every shop just to compete. Shops are finding it ever harder to manage the demands that are placed on them by the customer and the insurance company.
4. Dehumanization of the repair experience. Within the insurance industry’s excessive reliance on technology and outsourcing adjusters (IA’s) to cut costs, they are producing efficient, but oversimplified, solutions. These decrease the repair experience by weakening the emotional bonds of the shop with their customers or worse, destroy those ties by being annoying and unresponsive. Note all the recent insurance company commercials that support customer connectivity.
CUSTOMER RESEARCH:
THE FACTS
