Where Does the Customer Fit in With All This?

by Kris Burton, WMABA President

I’m fortunate enough to attend events all around the country and interact with other shops.

The conversation always goes back to negotiations with bill payers and the struggles we all face now more than ever. At our shop, we’ve had so many more challenges this year alone, more than any year previously. We all need to learn policy language and the laws to provide the client with repair options outside of what a third party deems is necessary to repair a wrecked vehicle.

The customer is the one who gets lost in all of it. They bring their vehicle in after one of the worst days of their year, trusting that the people working on it – and the people paying for it – have their best interest at heart. What they don’t realize is how much of that repair process has quietly shifted away from “What does this vehicle need to be safe and properly repaired?” to “What will the payer agree to cover?”

That’s not a knock on the insurance industry as a whole. It’s just the reality we’re operating in, and it’s only gotten more pronounced. The shops I talk to – whether they’re in Virginia, New Mexico or anywhere else – are telling the same story: more pushback on procedures, more line-item disputes and more “That’s not included in our database” conversations than ever before. And somewhere in the middle of all that back-and-forth sits a customer who just wants their car fixed right and returned to them.

This is where I think our role as shop owners and technicians has to expand. We can’t just be repairers anymore – we have to be educators and, in a lot of cases, advocates. That means knowing the policy language in the contracts our customers signed, understanding what states actually require when it comes to repair standards and consumer protections, and being able to clearly explain the difference between an estimate written to a database average and a repair plan written to OEM specification.

When a customer understands that the number on their insurance estimate isn’t a ceiling – it’s a starting point based on assumptions that may not reflect what their specific vehicle actually needs – it changes the conversation. They stop feeling like they’re stuck between two parties they don’t fully understand, and they start feeling like they have someone in their corner who’s explaining what’s actually happening to their car and why.

I’ve seen this play out firsthand. Walking a customer through exactly why a certain OEM procedure is non-negotiable – not because we’re trying to pad a bill, but because the manufacturer has documented it as required for that repair – turns what could be an adversarial situation into one where the customer becomes an active participant. They start asking their insurer the right questions. They start pushing back when something gets denied without justification. And honestly, that’s how it should work. The customer has more leverage in this relationship than most of them realize; they just don’t know what questions to ask.

For our shops, this means investing time in training – not just on repair procedures, but on the regulatory and policy side of the business. It means having documentation ready that explains, in plain language, why a repair plan looks the way it does. And it means being willing to have the harder conversation upfront, rather than letting a customer find out three weeks into a repair that there’s a gap between what their policy covers and what their car needs.

None of this is easy, and I won’t pretend it doesn’t add time and friction to an already stretched-thin operation. But I’d rather spend that time now than have a customer feel blindsided later – or worse, end up in a vehicle that wasn’t repaired to the standard it should have been because nobody took the time to explain why that standard mattered.

At the end of the day, the customer is who all of this is for.

Want more? Check out the July 2026 issue of Hammer & Dolly!