Insurance Steering Complaints Persist as Shops Push for Anti-Steering Enforcement

By mid-May 2022, the perennial tension between independent auto glass shops and insurance carrier steering practices had intensified amid the broader industry pressures of cost escalation and workforce shortage. Several state insurance departments had received elevated volumes of anti-steering complaints from glass shops that reported insurers were directing customers to specific network shops in states with statutes designed to preserve consumer choice.

Anti-steering laws in states including Florida, Arizona, and Minnesota generally require that insurers inform policyholders of their right to choose their repair shop. In practice, shop owners reported that insurers sometimes presented their preferred network shops as the only "covered" option, or warned that using an out-of-network shop would result in lower reimbursements—discouraging customer choice even where no out-of-pocket penalty actually existed.

The tension was structural: insurance companies had an incentive to steer volume to shops that had agreed to their pricing terms, and those pricing terms were often at or below the market rates that independent shops needed to cover rising material and labor costs. Shops that declined to accept low negotiated rates were effectively excluded from network referrals, reducing their volume even as their costs rose.

Industry associations including the Independent Glass Association had long documented steering complaint trends and urged state regulators to take enforcement action. But insurance regulatory capacity varied significantly by state, and the complaint process was rarely fast enough to address specific customer interactions in real time.

For shop owners navigating 2022's environment, the most effective counter to steering was a strong direct consumer relationship—marketing efforts, online reviews, and transparent communication about the customer's right to choose that reached policyholders before they called their insurer's claim hotline.

The steering issue also intersected with the ADAS calibration conversation in a specific way: some shop owners reported insurers steering customers to network shops that did not have calibration capability, with the result that the customer's vehicle was returned without proper ADAS recalibration. In states where safety advocates had documented this pattern, it provided a stronger public interest argument for anti-steering enforcement than purely economic competition concerns—framing insurer behavior as a safety issue rather than a business dispute.