Repairify’s new CEO and CTO first focused on customer feedback

Repairify’s new CEO, Srisu Subrahmanyam, and CTO Keith Crerar said they are focused on gathering customer feedback as they begin their new roles during a webinar held Tuesday. 

“I think the biggest step change that we are trying to do internally is think about everything from a customer’s lens and obsess over it,” Subrahmanyam said. 

He said the goal is to make life simpler for Repairify’s customers. 

“If I am a customer, if I put my customer hat on, I would ask myself a few questions of asTech and Repairify,” Subrahmanyam said. “Does the company offer solutions that make my life easier, and do they add value to my workflow? We also have to be cognizant of the fact that our work, the work that we do, is not the main work for our customers. It’s an important part of the piece or the puzzle. It’s a necessary piece of the puzzle, but that’s not the entire thing. So, whatever we do needs to be easy for them to use — seamless — and you provide an important service, but it needs to be very frictionless for them.” 

Subrahmanyam said it is also important that the company knows the needs of the customer and can anticipate how the industry is changing. 

“We have been successful in this, and we’ve provided this service for a long time, but to be honest, we don’t excel in these areas consistently,” Subrahmanyam said. “I think we’re pretty good, but we’re not excellent at it.” 

He added that last week, the company had a few technology-related issues. 

“We take this very, very seriously,” Subrahmanyam said. “ We’re deep-diving into the root cause of this. Essentially, what it meant was longer wait times for our customers, but we don’t accept that. We’ll go back [and] figure out what went wrong. Customers expect a very frictionless process with us, and we need to provide that reliably and consistently. Our goal is clear: make it easy for our customers to do business with us, and, more importantly, get to a point where they derive value from our partnership and not just a transactional side of the business.”

During a process of collecting feedback, customers have continued to vocalize one concern, Subrahmanyam said. 

“One of the challenges we have, I think I’ve heard consistently in our relationship with our customers, is given the context of the GEICO announcement from a year ago, and I’m trying to understand the environment that has created, in terms of who we serve as our customers and our relationship with them,” Subrahmanyam said. “I don’t claim to have all the answers. In fact, I have very little answers at this point, but I am willing to listen, learn, and adapt to what our customers need.”

He said the company needs to be very practical about listening to customers and rebuilding trust with them. 

“We have a lot of work to do in this respect because we provide a service,” Subrahmanyam said. “We certainly don’t take that for granted. We value our customer relationships, but there’s a lot of work that needs to get done with our customers and building that trust again. That’s what I’m committed to doing.” 

Subrahmanyam did not provide any further details about the GEICO agreement or how the company would move forward with it.  

Repairer Driven News (RDN) asked Repairify if it would continue forward with the GEICO agreement ahead of the webinar. The company didn’t answer the question by the publication deadline. 

Repairify also didn’t answer a question on whether it stands behind statements Chris Chesney, Repairify’s vice president of training and organization development, made on C&C Auto Show in November, when he was asked about the gap between cost and insurance coverage that collision businesses said was happening because of the GEICO agreement. Chesney, at the time, said in some cases, customers have to pick up the gap. 

Other questions that Repairify didn’t answer were whether the company planned to launch similar programs with other insurance carriers and if asTech has reviewed remote technician scripts to see if any other changes should be made following November updates to how technicians handle seat weight calibrations. 

Crerar said his focus is on gathering information from customers to determine the right future moves for the company. 

“My first four to six weeks, I spent a lot of time out of the field and at some of our delivery centers,” Crerar said. “I spent time in our shops, with our technicians, actually using our scan tools, using our calibration equipment, working with our remote technicians myself to understand how the workflow happened. Just walking through the different collision centers to really see how the workflow happens, from the estimator’s desk to the shop manager’s desk, to our teams, and then talking to some of our biggest customers that we have today and some customers that have left us.” 

Repairify has launched four different “Voice of the Customer” programs to gather feedback and data, Crerar said. He said this is the highest priority for the company right now. 

This includes a survey asking customers for direct feedback about the business overall. Another question survey has been placed at the end of customer calls, and a third survey is for technicians following the completion of a work order. The fourth program involves discussions with leaders of the business regularly for feedback. 

“We are trying to take all those things into account and create the best solutions we can,” Crerar said. 

Crerar said some areas he’s already focused on are more integrated workflows between ADASThink and the execution of the work that customers need to complete. Another issue is invoicing and payment reimbursement. 

“How can we support estimators in their shops? Several customers have told me that estimators can use upwards of 10 different pieces of software, depending on what customers they serve in the collision center,” Crerar said. “We’re trying to prioritize different components and different features in our workflow that help make invoicing, payments, and reimbursement simple.” 

Subrahmanyam filled an empty position previously held by Cris Hollingsworth. Subrahmanyam previously worked for OPENLANE as the executive vice president of operations and president of services and international markets. 

Crerar also comes from OPENLANE, where he served as the global senior vice president and head of service operations.

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Repairify CEO Srisu Subrahmanyam and Chief Transformation Officer Keith Crerar/Repairify