On this forum we often mentioned or discussed the poor quality repairs we come across while we are doing our rounds. Now why would we discuss or mention this, why would we ‘waste’ our time and energy?
In my opinion it is never a waste of time and energy, in fact we should continue to mention and discuss the problems in our industry and continue to strive for the best possible quality repairs. The reason for that is obvious, yet I still want to make it clear again that for many of us here on the forum; repairs is all we do. And for the other guys on the forum, involved in replacing glass, repairs are a pretty good source of income. The question is what the benefit of performing lousy repairs would be? Why do we see so many? Is it because too many people in our trade believe that ‘time is money’ and any repair should be performed in under 10 minutes? Is it perhaps a lack of interest, the evil ‘I don’t care attitude’, a poor repair system or resin or is it because the repairer was not qualified or properly trained? I believe that all of the above mentioned reasons, along with others, are the reason why we see so many poor repairs.
No matter what the reason was or will be there is and never will be a good reason to perform substandard or even bad repairs, things become really nasty when the customer is charged for that sort of ‘service’. Yet it happens everyday. It is sad to see that, in the pictured examples below, the customer has indeed been paying good money for a badly performed repair (be it the insurance, leasing or rental company or the vehicle owner, it is unethical to charge for bad work).
Randomly I picked last week as an example of how many substandard work we see, and I have found three very poor repairs that were recently performed. The ‘repair’ performed on the Mercedes was performed by the ‘world leader in auto glass repair and replacement’. This topic is not a matter of name and shame, that would be cheap and unfair, this topic is strictly because we need to maintain a high standard by performing the best possible quality repairs. And pictures say it best.
Of course there will always be mavericks out there damaging our trade and damaging the term repair.
You are right to say; ‘’don’t we all make mistakes’’? Sure we do! And there is nothing wrong with that. Of course we have performed a few ‘below standard’ repairs ourselves, but at least we informed the customer in an honest manner and have never charged the customer for substandard work which makes a big difference.
I do not believe in publishing any before/after images, as we all realize it is too easy to manipulate the resuts, therefore there will be only some ‘before’ examples. All pictures are cell phone quality, couldn’t do any better! Please look at the images and tell me what you think....
Would you have charged your customer for work like pictured below?
