Multi-Brand Claims Filing has become Overwhelming

In the early 1990’s if you wanted to file an appliance repair claim with most of the prominent manufacturers you mailed your paper Narda claim form or floppy disk to KeyPrestige Inc. (“KPI”) for processing. Then you waited for the U.S. mail to deliver the processing results of your claims on a printed report. All seemed simple at the time and who would have ever dreamed that in 30 years the industry at large would have created so much confusion. Today, the number of places that you need to file a claim, depending on the obligor, has quadrupled. Further the variety of ways that are used to file claims and to access the processing results vary from using a web portal to email or snail mail. If your business runs service calls for multiple companies, this can become very confusing. The following is a list of the most common web portals for filing appliance repair claims.

“Is your service management software equipped to handle multi-obligor warranty claims?”

Below is a list of the most common service management software packages used by appliance service companies many of which do not contain some of the of the unique claim data fields that vary by job source thus further compounding claims filing issues.

Did you think about asking your software provider prior to the purchase if they stored the “installation code” for Sub Zero or the “Mfg F-ident code” for Bosch, or the “Job Code” for GE, or the “Product SKU Code” for Beko.

How many different types of “codes” are used in the appliance service industry? If you run warranty calls for a variety of job sources, then you have been exposed to all of the codes shown below. Does your software have a place to store this data so that you can file a valid claim?

Most likely the answer to that question is NO. Therefore, after you send the claim from your software to the appropriate processing portal you still must swivel to log into the portal and update all the missing information which is time consuming and cumbersome. Of course, if you don’t take this action, you don’t get paid.

Another confusing and disruptive portion of the claim is knowing the part distributor account numbers for each portal. Why can’t each distributor have the same distributor number for all portals? For example, the Marcone account number in ServiceBench for Whirlpool is 131150 and in ServicePower for GE it is 61330. Electrolux is 31094 and for Speed Queen its 0000100675. This is just just one example of the amount of data you need to keep updated in your software.

Multi-Brand Claims Filing has become Overwhelming