Turning Insurance’s Most Common Claim Into a Retention Tool

Rochelle Thielen has been flying since high school — a passion no one else in her family shared — and originally planned to make it her career, until marrying a professional helicopter pilot (who flies for UCLA Children’s) redirected her path. As an Angeleno and licensed pilot herself, she and Gilad touched briefly on the loss of Kobe Bryant, whom Rochelle noted was known within the tight-knit local helicopter piloting community — a loss she described, with real restraint, as one that’s genuinely hard to make sense of from the outside, and not something she felt comfortable speculating about.

Rochelle’s career path into insurance started at CarsDirect during the early days of e-commerce car sales in Los Angeles, before a headhunter recruited her — almost on a whim, she admitted, since insurance felt like an arbitrary next step at the time — to a company that later became Solera, working in auto physical damage. A decade at Mitchell International followed, where she became genuinely passionate about the industry’s shift from technicians using hammers to technicians needing to understand vehicle calibration and coding as cars grew more computerized. A connection eventually led her to a Los Angeles seed-stage startup building early AI for vehicle damage assessment, where she joined as CRO and quickly became CEO — until the company’s direction shifted away from the AI work she cared about most, and she and the company parted ways. From there, a introduction through Julie Uhrman (now president and co-founder of Angel City Football Club) connected her to her neighbor, who happened to be building HONK — bringing Rochelle to her current role.

About Rochelle Thielen

Rochelle Thielen is Chief Revenue Officer at HONK, an on-demand roadside assistance platform connecting drivers with a network of roughly 70,000 towing and roadside providers, built specifically to serve insurance carriers, fleets, and other businesses as a retention and claims tool. She joined HONK nearly three years before this recording, initially as VP of Network before moving into the CRO role.

Uber for Roadside Assistance

HONK’s founder built the company after a personal, frustrating experience — waiting an hour on the side of the road while tow truck after tow truck drove past without stopping. The team, made up entirely of technologists rather than roadside industry veterans, built what Rochelle describes as an Uber- or Lyft-style model for towing: rather than the traditional territory-based dispatch system (where a single operator holds exclusive rights to a geographic radius and every call in that area gets routed to them regardless of availability or fit), HONK connects a stranded driver to the closest trusted, well-equipped provider in real time. Rochelle was candid that she couldn’t point to a documented history of how the old territory-based system originated, but described the likely evolution as large operators trading territorial exclusivity for standardized SLAs and pricing — a structure that, over time, became counterproductive to the customer experience it was originally meant to protect.

Why Roadside Is Insurance’s Highest-Leverage Retention Moment

Roadside assistance is, by a wide margin, the most common insurance claim a policyholder files — far more frequent than a collision, which for most drivers happens only once every seven to ten years. That frequency makes roadside claims a disproportionately powerful retention lever: most people’s default memory of a roadside incident is unpleasant, so a genuinely fast, well-handled experience under a carrier’s brand — Rochelle pointed to her prior work with Farmers Insurance as a formative example — measurably moves the needle on that cohort’s retention. HONK tracks this directly through NPS, and Rochelle described the mental shift for a carrier partner as moving from “how do we handle a tire change” to “how do we retain claimants in an intensely competitive market.”

Bringing AI to the Scene, Not Waiting for the Body Shop

HONK’s more recent push involves accelerating claims-adjacent AI, not by building damage-assessment models itself, but by getting the AI that companies like Tractable and Claim Genius are already building physically closer to the accident scene, faster. In a typical accident, the people present are the driver, a police officer, and the tow truck operator — the driver is neither positioned nor expected to make a total-loss determination in that moment. Because HONK’s network has always required its providers to use its technology (not phone calls or faxes) from day one, HONK can deploy that AI assessment directly at the tow truck, in real time — catching a borderline total-loss vehicle before it’s sent to the wrong destination (a collision facility instead of a salvage yard, for instance), saving days of delay, avoided storage disputes, and unnecessary rental car costs. The next step Rochelle described as a long-standing industry “holy grail”: closing out a full estimate directly from that same on-scene data capture.

What a Chief Revenue Officer Actually Does

Rochelle pushed back on a common misconception about her title — that a CRO role is primarily about pricing and sales negotiation. In practice, she described it as staying closely attuned to marketplace dynamics (like the AI shifts discussed above), maintaining strategic alignment between HONK’s own executive priorities and its carrier partners’ evolving needs, and moving quickly enough to capture emerging opportunity while keeping the actual customer experience seamless throughout. She named Farmers Insurance and Wawanesa (a major California carrier) as long-standing partners who’ve been especially aggressive about using roadside as a broader strategic lever, and noted that HONK’s value proposition — thinking differently about a carrier’s business, not just fixing tires — is also what has attracted newer insurtechs like Branch and Toco to the platform.

Beyond Insurance: Consumers and Virtual Car Buying

HONK actually launched as a consumer-facing app first, and individual drivers can still download it directly today. Beyond insurance, Rochelle pointed to virtual car buying — companies like Carvana and Vroom — as an unexpected growth area accelerated by the pandemic. These fully digital dealerships need to move vehicles across a “last mile” radius (roughly 50 miles) that large car-hauler trucks handle poorly, especially for short distances or into residential neighborhoods; HONK’s existing network and algorithms turned out to transfer directly to that logistics gap.

Advice: Relentless

For her closing recommendation, Rochelle pointed to Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable by Tim Grover, the longtime mental and physical trainer for Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. She acknowledged the book is deliberately raw, even borderline offensive to some readers, but found its core message — learning to trust instinct over overthinking, and staying steady under pressure rather than letting emotion compromise decision-making — genuinely useful for leading a team through sustained uncertainty, and has recommended it widely to her own team and to other leaders she works with.

Key Takeaways

• Roadside assistance is insurance’s most frequent claim by a wide margin, which makes it a disproportionately powerful retention lever — a carrier that delivers a genuinely good roadside experience is directly influencing long-term retention, not just resolving a single tire change
• HONK’s core model replaces territory-based dispatch (where a fixed operator handles every call in a radius regardless of speed or fit) with a real-time, Uber-style match to the closest trusted provider — a structural fix to a system that had drifted away from the customer experience it was originally designed around
• Because HONK’s provider network has used its technology from day one instead of phone calls or faxes, HONK can bring third-party AI damage-assessment tools (like Tractable and Claim Genius) directly to the accident scene via the tow truck, catching borderline total-loss cases before a vehicle is routed to the wrong destination
• Rochelle’s clearest reframe of the CRO role: it’s fundamentally about tracking marketplace dynamics and staying aligned with strategic partners’ evolving needs, not simply negotiating pricing
• HONK’s roadside network and logistics technology transferred directly into an unexpected adjacent market — virtual car buying platforms like Carvana and Vroom, which need last-mile vehicle movement that traditional car-hauler trucks handle poorly