Elephant Insurance Implements CCC

Other entry-level hires often start off in a shop’s parts department, with opportunities for a career path laid out up front.

“You’re not going to be stuck on the wash rack or with a broom the rest of your life,” Reichen said. “If they demonstrate a good work ethic, then our master technicians will say they are interested in taking on this person, being a mentor, to grow them, whether their interest is on the refinish or body side or mechanical.”

He said getting on a collision repair training program’s advisory committee is one of the best ways both to find entry-level employees and help with the industry’s overall technician shortage.

“We also look at the high schools with the SkillsUSA program,” Reichen said. “We find that even though a high school may not have an auto body or refinishing program, they may have a mechanical program. And with our industry changing, with more and more calibrations and ADAS and things like that, there’s opportunity there. You have to get creative.”

He said his company also works with those being released from a state penitentiary. “That involves a certain amount of calculated risk,” Reichen acknowledged. “It’s a lot of work, but we’ve had a pretty good success rate with doing that.”

Andy Tylka of the Tag Auto Group in Indiana acknowledged it has been a challenge maintaining his company’s culture while growing the business from six shops to 15 over two and a half years.

“But those people decided to sell to me because our culture was very similar to theirs,” Tylka said at the SCRS event. “A single-family-owned culture. Knowing everyone’s name, having those conversations, knowing something about everybody’s life, them knowing your life.”

He said rewarding loyalty is extremely important. “There might be a shop that needs a technician and they’ll just load [the new hire] full of benefits and pay, while disregarding the loyal employees who have been there all along,” Tylka said. “I need to do a better job of that as well.”

Growing your own new employees is a great way to instill your culture, he said. He spoke at several Indiana Auto Body Association chapter meetings last year to share details about his company’s apprenticeship program, including how it’s structured, the check-off lists of what apprentices need to learn and how to find apprentices, not just through auto body job boards but those for construction and plumbing, etc.

“Because there are people in those trades who are having a bad day or are looking for another industry,” Tylka said. “What shocked me was through all the chapter meetings, there were only two shops that had a structured apprenticeship program. All the others were deterred from getting apprentices because they just didn’t know what to do with them.

“I think that’s what the industry needs is at least some kind of guideline to give a mom-and-pop shop some direction as to apprentices other than just putting a kid with a technician and hoping they learn something,” Tylka said. “I’m hoping as our apprenticeship develops to share that within Indiana, and that will start to have a snowball effect.”

CCC Intelligent Solutions announced Elephant Insurance will extend its use of CCC technology to include its AI-powered, digital claims solutions. Specifically, Elephant will leverage CCC’s technology to help digitize and further transform total loss resolution, advancing the insurer’s ability to deliver straight-through processing across the claims experience.

Total losses have been increasing in recent years, driven by a confluence of factors including surging new and used vehicle prices, growing complexity of the cars themselves and supply chain disruptions driving up the cost of replacement parts. With CCC, insurers can proactively engage policyholders following a probable total loss and guide them in capturing important information. Leveraging photos of vehicle damage, AI and the CCC Cloud, insurers can more quickly make decisions and digitize connections and information sharing with participating auto lenders to achieve faster resolution.

Source: CCC

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