CIC discussion: Insufficient auto insurer education could trigger unnecessary battles at body shops

Collision Industry Conference participants last week suggested the auto insurance industry may not be training sufficiently to judge repair plans for modern vehicles.

Repairers also discussed failing among claims personnel to comprehend the variety within the modern vehicle fleet and the shop preparation essential to fix those vehicles. This could potentially be an actuarial training deficiency as well if premiums are set lacking since the underwriters underestimate the vehicle’s complexity and price to repair.

Industry Relations Committee panelist and Precision Body & Paint owner Ron Reichen said his shop finds itself constantly educating insurers, noting a “larger disconnect” with that side of the collision ecosystem in terms of keeping up with the issue.

Panelist Roger Wright, the founder of VectorSquared, told the crowd he visited a technical school, then spent Two decades being an insurer hearing and learning from body shops.

“I suppose we’ve lost that, maybe,” he explained.

Insurers and repairers ought to be learning the same thing by taking exactly the same I-CAR classes, but somehow, it’s not translating towards the field, Wright said. He named it “kind of disappointing.”

Audience member Gary Wano, who owns G.W. and Son Autobody, observed that he was astounded by the depth of data required to achieve I-CAR Platinum estimator status. He wondered if this rigor existed when an insurer seeks to become I-CAR Platinum in estimating.

“It seems that there is a lot of disparity” from a Platinum insurance appraiser and Platinum repair shop estimator, Wano said.

“It is the exact same course,” Bud Center, I-CAR manager of technical research and development, said of the I-CAR blueprinting course. Center said I-CAR seeks to bring the 2 sides together.

I-CAR makes insurance industry appraisers take 28 courses to reach ProLevel 1, while auto repair shop estimators take 22.

However, while insurance appraisers achieve Platinum status at ProLevel 1, body shop estimators don’t reach Platinum status until ProLevel 3. This involves another 16 ProLevel 2 courses and nine ProLevel 3 classes.

I-CAR requires Platinum insurance appraisers to help keep upgrading ProLevels annually to have their status. ProLevel 2 for appraisers involves taking 12 more classes. ProLevel 3 requires four more.

Many of the courses required for both career recognitions are indeed identical.

Reichen said he felt the disconnect between insurers and repairers had worsened. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the “physical relationship” by having an adjuster — the ability to physically point to something relevant to the repair — had vanished, he said. Precision Body & Paint didn’t know the person on the other end of a virtual claim, their background education level, he explained.

“The distance forwards and backwards is larger because of the learning curve,” Reichen said.

Wright reflected that he had 3 weeks of training, but some photo estimators had just a single week of coaching.

ProSight Specialty Insurance dealership and repairer program head David Willett, another panelist, called a skilled labor shortage an issue on the insurer side. Personnel lack that background on collision repair.

He noted that as a repair shop liability insurer, ProSight has a Tire Industry Association-certified instructor and ASE Master and I-CAR Platinum technicians within the company. The insurer’s ratings staffer used to be a mechanic. Repairers tell ProSight personnel they might work in that repair shop.

“But that’s not the norm,” Willett said.

An earlier CIC session described five basic skills the industry want to see drummed into every vo-tech student, even in the cost of teaching more advanced processes. Understanding of detailing, plastic repair, preparing parts for paint, repairing small dents and removing and replacing bolt-on parts would be to generate a viable entry-level collision workforce, repairers have concluded.

But could an insurance adjuster evaluating a repair even pass an evaluation on those five skills, Willet asked. No, he argued.

“Let’s be serious,” he said.

Reichen said he constantly has to explain sacrificial panels to insurers, and Precision Body & Paint even still sees “floor pulls” on estimates written off photographs. “That’s archaic,” he explained.

DCR Systems CEO Michael Giarrizzo, a third-generation repairer along with a panelist, noted that collision education in the past have been more generic, but so were repair processes. Now, the variations in shop capabilities are at their widest range ever, and vehicle complexity is continuing to grow.

Yet there’s a mentality that insurers owe all repairers around the same price, Giarrizzo said, arguing this made no sense — a less educated shop doesn’t deserve the same amount as a skilled one.

Reichen said insurers will declare they’ve never paid for a specific operation before. But “cars were never made this way before,” he explained. The vehicle dictates the operation.

Reichen pointed out that this concern reaches the underwriting department as well. Similar to the Tesla debut, nobody knows how to insure vehicles from startup OEMs Rivian or Lucid — they never existed before, he said.

A body shop’s capital investments are completely different than 5 years ago, and they will be different five years in to the future, Reichen said. Yet insurers seek a normal solution, he explained.