Authorisation

Re: Authorisation

It’s not repaircare that’s the problem.

It’s the insurers as they’ve all changed how they work and authorising repairs that you just sit and think “why?” when you get the go on it.

To briefly explain it, the insurer looks at the machine, the repair cost, the length left on the policy, the history and weighs that up against the cost to replace the machine or whatever. Often you’ll see machines at 3+ or 4+ years getting crazy repairs authorised but the reasoning is that, if the machine then manages to get out of the policy expiration date without further fault the cost is lower than a new machine.

Many of the policies that have been sold are “new for old” rather than the older ones that depreciated the value of the product over time and so, we now see this sort of thing happening.

The short of it is, you can’t write a lot of them off just by slinging an extra few parts on the job.

What I find, not with repaircare as I don’t do any work for them, is that in a good many cases the parts for these sorts of jobs aren’t readily available.

Customer then screams and screams as it takes so long as the bits have to be ordered (even if it is only a week or so) and the insurer often capitulates and exchanges/refunds anyway. This would include where it is clearly stated that parts are OOS.

We all hear it every day, “I’ve paid this policy to have a working machine, I should get 5 star treament” etc. To which I often think, “don’t you think that, as we get paid once the job’s complete, that we want it done ASAP as well… like we are trying to get it done as quickly as we can.”

It’s not the end of the world financially as most of the people I deal with, DAG in particular, are brilliant about such things for the most part but it is a customer orientated nightmare, especially where you’ve got no ETA on a part to offer them. Then they go bump their gums at whoever, then they call you up complaining then…. and on and on it goes.

It’s all good fun.

K.