Chris Chesney: The Role of the Pre-Repair Scan & ADAS Identification in Driving Customer Satisfaction

Fixed Ops Roundtable

Chris Chesney is the Vice President of training and organizational development at a company called Repairify. Chris Chesney is regarded as one of the most outstanding educators in the automotive industry. He has experience building and growing some of the most successful automotive training organizations in the automotive industry.

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What we discuss in this episode:

What is it about the newer vehicles' technology that makes them more challenging to repair? And how do service departments overcome that?

"Safety systems are something that snuck up into the industry. And I would challenge the industry to look at them as an opportunity to have a better conversation with their customers because the motorist doesn't understand what these systems are. Many of them are annoyed by them." Chris said.

"If you've ever driven a vehicle with a lane departure warning, that kinda warns you when you're getting outside the white lines. But if you have lane keep assist where it nudges you and tries to steer you back into the centre of the lane, and our customers are still doing that today. Yet this past month, we had the highest casualty rate in our industry over the last decade of vehicles on the road that caused injuries or casualties caused by a motor vehicle accident." With all these new technologies still in play today on the vehicles being sold. Why do we still see that? It's because the new car dealer, the salesperson that sold the vehicle, didn't onboard the motorist in a way that helped them understand the value of keeping those systems on and what it can do for them.

When we look at ADAS systems, there are many items that people don't recognize as advanced driver assist systems, including things like pretension seat belts, that in a collision when you apply the brakes or the system uses the brakes automatically, it pretensions that seatbelt cis it up against your body So when your mass moves forward, it tries to arrest that momentum and prevents injury. And that's super critical to recognize. But does the consumer know that? No, they don't.

Vehicles are more complex today than they were last year, and that's going to increase every year to the point in the next couple of years, every vehicle will have multiple systems on board that are either voluntarily installed because the manufacturers knew that NTSA, the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration would require them to do that, like an automated emergency brake.

So the complexity is increasing. That impacts everything that happens in the dealer, in the collision centre. I don't care where you're approaching that vehicle from a service perspective; it influences your workflow and your technician's skill set and affects the standards in which you take the car in. As we take those vehicles in, we've got to process them differently. We also need to make sure we have the right parts available to service those vehicles.

When we're looking at especially workflow, it's that Pre-Repair scan that we've got to perform on every vehicle that comes into the collision centre because of the carriers. The insurance companies want to know what was going on with that vehicle before the collision cause they don't want to pay for it.

And the Collision Center needs to know so that they know how to approach this vehicle and what repairs and or calibrations need to be made to that vehicle before they return it to the motorist so it's operating exactly as the manufacturer designed it to work. And if it's not, the collision Center opens itself up to massive litigation and liability, High risk because it's not the dent in the fender or the quarter panel or the ADAS sensor that was damaged and needed to be replaced recalibrated that costs money. It's bodily injury that costs m