Recognizing these factors, all the results still confirmed that none of the numbers produced anything resembling the expectations being placed on repairers by some in the insurance industry.”

According to the SCRS, insurance companies using a six-hour-per-day calculation give customers an expectation that a 30-hour job will be completed in five days. Others using a five-hour-per-day benchmark, say that same job will be completed in six days.

“The resulting calculations demonstrate the huge level of disparity between reality and expectation,” added Schulenburg. “Unfortunately, these false levels of expectation add waste into the repair process by creating costly and unnecessary administration for both the repairer and the rental agency, and can almost assuredly factor in a level of frustration for the consumer that could be avoided if we used better information to set their expectation at the onset of the process. The objective should be to set an expectation that will produce a consumer experience that lives up to what was promised; unfortunately, if we use bad data to establish the metrics, we are setting ourselves up for failure from the beginning.”

SCRS national director Dusty Womble used the same methods to calculate repair expectation times in his own facility, Roger Beasley Collision Center in Austin, Texas. After the analysis, he determined that 2.0 hours per day was the appropriate expectation level to give his customers, citing the complexity and challenges involved in the repair process.

“Interestingly, the adjusted formula made a huge difference in our customer interactions,” Womble said. “Our Customer Service Index (CSI) scores shot up by about 7 percentage points, simply because the consumer perception regarding the vehicle being delivered ‘on time’ changed. We didn’t adjust anything else in our workflow, other than the expectation we were setting up front for the anticipated completion.