Playing the Percentages

More responses were received this year than ever before for INSIGHT’s annual Who Pays for What? survey! A big thank you goes out to all the readers who took time out of their very busy schedules to complete the survey forms and get them back to INSIGHT. Without your feedback, the informative yearly feature article would be a complete blank page.

The overall satisfaction level of 60 percent reported by shops responding to our survey changed only a hair from the 61 percent of one year ago.

State Farm’s relationship with shops performing collision repair continues to win the Who Pays for What? Fair Player crown - for the sixth year straight. As the chart on page nine indicates, State Farm “always pays” almost half the time for p-page items, with a whopping 119 percent increase in “always pays” since 1997. While this is down from the insurer’s record 136 percent increase posted in 2004, none of the other big insurers come even remotely near this level. USAA is a distant runner-up with a 37 percent increase that brings its “always pays” up to just under 30 percent.

The survey results for the P-page items that are least frequently paid point out the sore subject of non-OEM parts usage. Both additional prep of non-OEM parts and fit of non-OEM parts are rarely paid P-page items. These procedures are the lowest “always paid,” at only four percent of the time.

Our TrendLine results this month indicate that our responding shops with DRP agreements with Nationwide are a little happier with the insurer than they were a year ago. Overall satisfaction with Nationwide rose from 2.74 to 3.10, on a scale from 1 (Poor) to 5 (Excellent). Only State Farm and USAA received overall shop satisfaction scores over 4.00. Both insurers have the fairest DRP agreements according to our respondents, too.

It seems that, despite Progressive’s Penny Pincher status in our Who Pays for What? survey results, the innovative Cleveland-based insurer is maintaining pretty good relationships with its DRP facilities. Progressive came in third in the TrendLine for overall satisfaction, at 3.42, and got the highest mark for increasing shop business. Progressive’s 4.27 score was well ahead of the rest of the field.

Farmers and GEICO may want to have some discussions with their DRP shops. Both insurers scored below a 3.00 in every category, and GEICO’s overall satisfaction score of 2.30 was the lowest seen so far.