4 Questions with Peter Necheles of Agero

Agero provides white-labeled roadside assistance programs for some of the strongest brands in the U.S., including many of the leading automobile manufacturers, auto insurance companies, and fleet management companies, and this has been our passion for almost 50 years. We’ve designed our programs to work behind the scenes, marrying a deep understanding of our clients’ brands with sophisticated service delivery.

At Agero I’m responsible for our legal functions which include compliance and risk management. We make it our mission to continuously focus on the customer’s experience at their time of need when facing an unexpected disablement, whether at home or on the side of the road. We handle nearly 12 million of these service events per year, measuring each one against specific KPIs—such as customer NPS feedback, estimated and actual time of arrival, and more—to provide high levels of transparency back to our clients and to continually improve our processes.

With nearly 12 million disablement events per year, we are able to provide the dispatch opportunities to participants in our network of independent contractors. These suppliers are critical to our success and we invest significant resources in our vetting activities as well as our ongoing reviews.

As part of our onboarding of these suppliers, we review their management of risks—do they have the right experiences to provide the services, do they have the right level and type of insurance coverage, and have they carefully reviewed and considered the individuals that they are employing as their drivers. The safety of our customers is of the utmost importance. Checkr has been and continues to be integral in this process, assisting us in being able to rapidly and accurately background check providers before officially welcoming them to our managed network and dispatching them to events.

Once added to our ecosystem, our network management team monitors the performance of each of these service providers, tracking their real-time performance: taking the voice of the consumer for feedback on each service event, monitoring for the timeliness of the services provided, as well as assessing other factors.

We have been fortunate to work with terrific providers that are passionate about their industry and have tremendous skills. The pressures these suppliers face with recruiting and retaining skilled drivers is incredibly difficult in today’s market, and we are actively working to understand their biggest challenges and help them be better prepared with excess capacity.

Because of the nature of our business, whereby we manage both in-house employees and a network of independent, third-party service provider contractors that work directly with our end customers, I think about risk management in two ways.

First, it’s about bringing on the right people. Whether we are hiring for internal roles or vetting a service provider to be part of our network, we need to ensure we’re tapping the right resources and talents for our business. Background checks, hand in hand with our other review processes, enable this.

Second, it’s about making this process as simple and seamless as possible. Being able to leverage a technology like Checkr that is easy for our service providers to use, can capture all of the various pieces of information we need throughout the vetting process, consolidate it all on the back end for our in-house teams, and can provide quick turnaround, is incredibly valuable to our company.

Agero, as a business, is becoming increasingly digital. We are not only leading the way in transforming the roadside assistance industry from one that is manual and analog to one that is more automated and efficient, we are digitalizing our own internal operations across the board—from how we communicate with one another to how we content share to how we report to our clients. We are focused on providing solutions—to all our stakeholders—that are easy, more transparent and accessible, that are digital-first and data-focused. Our risk management process for our people and are network sits squarely within all of this, enabling us to grow our people and providers as quickly as we are growing our products and services.

Learn more about how Agero reduces risk at high hiring volume in our recent customer story.