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Letter to the Editor

Swing Your Partner

Our feature this month examines the recently announced decision by USAA that requires all collision repair facility participants in the insurer’s direct repair program to use only one specific CSI program from a particular provider. It must be noted that each of the CSI program providers currently active in the marketplace is an experienced, respected company with a loyal following of shops that really feel they get real value and support from using it.

It must be noted that INSIGHT’s CSI program was excluded from USAA’s first push to go beyond requiring customer satisfaction indexing to requiring one of two providers, a few years back. We never received a response to our understandably puzzled question concerning why INSIGHT’s program, or any other program, was left off the choice list (of only two companies). No immediately apparent criteria seemed to be used by USAA then to construct its short-list of CSI providers.

Well, now the short-list is even shorter. Any STARS (USAA’s DRP) shop is now required to use Autochex as its CSI program vendor. Autochex has a good program - that is not the problem. The problem is in two parts:

Part 1: An insurer partner certainly has the right to require customer satisfaction tracking in a repair facility, even with detailed directions concerning what results it wants, but should an insurer be permitted to dictate a choice of vendor to its shop partner?

Part 2: Given that Autochex’s parent company is Mitchell International, and that a STARS shop is also being asked to use Mitchell’s Communications Manager, to upload EMS data from the shop’s estimating system to Mitchell, the security of a shop’s data seems to be at risk.

INSIGHT will continue to report on this evolving news, as well as on SCRS’s objections to USAA’s new “dance step.”

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