Bodyshop hold-time variance is the silent cost in your indemnity spend. SwiftCase decides when a bodyshop is due a chase, Switchboard makes the call and writes what was promised back to the case. In production at Laird Assessors today.
Why It Matters
Hold-time variance is the kind of cost that does not show up as a line item. It hides in hire-vehicle days, customer escalations, and handler hours.
Every extra day a vehicle sits at a bodyshop is hire-vehicle days, possibly storage costs, and customer escalation risk. Hold-time variance compounds across the book.
Customers chase you because you have not chased the bodyshop. The handler time you spend explaining is time you do not spend resolving.
Some bodyshops get chased weekly. Others get forgotten. The slow ones learn which insurers do not chase, and they prioritise accordingly.
A handler asking a bodyshop “is the estimate ready yet?” is overhead. The same handler reviewing a finalised estimate is value. Switching the ratio is the point.
The Chase Queue
Five steps from workflow trigger to case update, with each change to the case logged in Timeline.
SwiftCase workflows track expected milestones per case: estimate due, repairs in progress, completion expected. When a milestone slips, the case enters the chase queue.
SwiftCase asks Switchboard to call, one call per chase, in the voice you chose for the agent. It presses the keypad options to get through the bodyshop's phone menu, identifies as the insurer or assessor, and asks the questions its rules set out. If an answering machine picks up, it leaves a message or hangs up.
Estimate ready Tuesday. Repairs starting Thursday. Vehicle ready next Friday. Each commitment written to a field on the case, with the call's summary and outcome kept in Switchboard.
Case fields updated as the call progresses. Your workflow picks up the new dates, moves the milestones and queues any customer update for a handler to approve. The case is up to date when the call ends.
Because each promise lands in a field on the case, your workflow rules can spot persistent slippage or repeated reschedules and pass the case to a handler, who sees the chase history on the case.
Screenshots
Rules decide when a bodyshop gets chased, and the board shows which repairs are holding claims up.
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The chase queue stops being a cost centre and starts being a data feed.
Routine chase calls leave the engineer queue entirely. Engineers and senior handlers work on assessments, disputes, and total-loss conversations: the work only they can do.
Every supplier gets chased on the same schedule. Variance between bodyshops drops because pressure becomes consistent. Outlier suppliers surface because the data is clean.
Set the agent to record and each chase call can be played back, while each promise sits on the case and its changes are logged in Timeline. Carrier audits and FOS files get a supplier-management history without anyone hunting for it.
Fewer hire-vehicle days, fewer customer escalations, a shorter cycle. A pilot measures what the chase queue saves against what Switchboard costs to run it.
Buyer Questions
Yes. Switchboard runs outbound bodyshop chasing in production at Laird Assessors today, alongside out-of-hours calls and total-loss valuation conversations. See the Laird year-in-review for the production volumes.
Switchboard uses ElevenLabs voices that sound natural. Whether it says it's an AI is up to you: where you want explicit AI disclosure (because regulator policy or your supplier code of conduct requires it), it is a line in the agent's greeting or rules.
Its rules can tell it to put the bodyshop straight through to your team, on the number you set. It's a straight transfer, so the handler picks up a live call. The call's outcome is recorded, so over time you see which suppliers do this routinely and can address it as a relationship issue.
Yes. The agent's rules set the questions to ask, the order, the tone, how to handle pushback, and when to put the call through to a person. You can start with our defaults during a 30-day pilot and tune from real call data.
Switchboard reads from and writes to the SwiftCase case file directly. It does not sit beside your case management as a separate log; the fields it captures land on the case as if a handler had typed them, logged as an API request showing who sent it. The transcript isn't attached to the case; it goes to your notification email if you've set one.
Switchboard's chase calls are started by SwiftCase and its case tools work on SwiftCase cases, so it fits best where SwiftCase is the operational layer (workflows, Timeline). Its end-of-call webhook can also send the outcome, summary and details collected on to another system.
30 days. Switchboard runs your chase queue alongside your existing process. Compare hold-time variance, handler hours, and customer escalation rate. Decide.
