ClearQuote for Inspections : Car Rentals
Over the years the car rental industry has been able to successfully leverage digitization to improve their processes and enhance customer experience. Biometric id verification and face recognition, connected cars and telematics, have led to operational efficiencies and improvement in customer experience.
One area of improvement still remains — ensuring accurate and timely identification of damages on the car to ensure customers feel at peace while renting or returning cars.
Problem Statement
During the car rental process one of the most important procedures carried out, either by the valet or by the customer, is the car inspection process. Often this becomes an area of dispute between customers and rental companies when damages on the car are overlooked by one or both parties leading to unfair decisions on who bears the liability. Manual inspection is an expensive and time consuming process especially at high throughput locations such as airport rental outlets where thousands of inspections need to be carried out every day.
The current inspection process is largely manual.
Some rental companies still use paper and pen in order to capture a car’s condition. Although a good number of them have moved to an app based inspection which enables capture of images and digitize the process to some extent. There are clear drawbacks of a pen-and-paper inspection process
- Damages can be overlooked — paper & pen method of capturing a vehicle’s condition is non-representative of the actual condition of the car.
- It can be time consuming
- No simple way to access vehicle history
- Paper pile up — inefficient and not environment friendly.
- Easy to dispute
- Insurance claim rejection
- Poor customer experience…
And the list goes on
There are rental companies that digitize the inspection process with mobile apps. This involves the customer or the valet to capture images or videos of the car. The images itself serve the purpose of reference at a later point in time to verify the car’s condition but still has the following drawbacks
- Requires the user to manually identify and annotate the damages which is time consuming ends wasting the customer’s time (in addition to the valet or inspector)
- Some damages may be overlooked — resulting in disputes or rejected insurance claims
- No easy way to view the damage history of a car — requires manual effort to review inspections and images
- Difficult to administer in the case of free floating car-share
Add to this a need to make the whole handover process contact-less in the post COVID-19 world. App based car unlocking helps but without an efficient inspection process is at best a half baked solution.
Imagine technology that could identify damages simply from the images of a car such that you know what type of damage has occurred on which part of the car and whether or not it already existed on the car at the time of pickup. Reduces the time required for a vehicle inspection to a 60 second walk around video and at the same time improves accuracy of damage detection.
Well, we’ve built just that..
ClearQuote — vehicle inspection simplified for car rentals
Clearquote app smartphone images or videos to identify and assess the damages on the external surface of the car, dramatically improving the vehicle inspection process.
So a customer or the car rental executive could just walk around the car capturing a video or images and leave the rest to ClearQuote.
ClearQuote can also draw a comparison between the condition of the car at the time of its last inspection vs the current one.
How it works
- Customer and vehicle details loaded
- Capture videos/images of the entire car — once each during pick up and drop off
- ClearQuote technology will analyze images and produce a report when the trip is completed identifying whether there were incremental damages on the car or not.
Its that simple.
Benefits
- More efficient vehicle handover process
- Contactless or ‘touchless’ method of recording the condition of the vehicle using one’s own smartphone — prevents use of traditional paper and pen, shared ipads etc. Customers can do a self inspection as well
- Detailed record of vehicle damages and history
- Ascertain liability in a simple and transparent manner — zero disputes and zero insurance claim rejections
Coming soon…
Drive through automated inspections without the need for expensive camera tunnels. Easy to install and deploy at any location — be it at a high volume airport location or an in-city basement car park.
We would love to hear from you regarding your thoughts on ClearQuote. Feel free to drop us a mail at hello@clearquote.io and we would be happy to give you a test drive of the application!
