Talk about a bad example. I attended the Collision Industry Conference at NACE last week and took great interest in a panel discussion on steering. One of the insurance company representatives said that not explaining to a policyholder the benefits of going to one of an insurer's preferred shops would be like telling someone after he had dinner that he could have gotten a 20 percent discount.
Huh? First of all, when the policyholder takes his or her car to an insurer's preferred shop, it's the insurer who's getting the discount, not the policyholder. Maybe he meant to say the policyholder's "discount" is in not having to pay any out-of-pocket costs. But the insurer's role here is to make the policyholder whole no matter what it takes. If charges are deemed reasonable, then the insurer has to pony up and the policyholder will not have to pay any out-of-pocket costs. It was just a really bad comparison which he attempted to use to explain why insurers push their preferred shops onto consumers.