Insurance self inspections — simplified

Venkat Sreeram
ClearQuote
Published in
4 min readAug 2, 2021
Photo by Scott Umstattd on Unsplash

When a car owner wants to renew an expired motor insurance policy, usually known as break-in insurance, the insurer would (in most cases) want to inspect the car to ascertain its condition.

A lot of insurance “pre-inspections” are carried out by third party inspection agencies who send trained inspectors to the customer’s location. This is quite time consuming and expensive for the insurer and a poor experience for the car owner.

Vehicle self inspection is a feature whereby car owners can inspect their cars by capturing images or videos on their smartphone, mostly using an insurer’s app. A team of people at the insurer review these images or videos to verify their authenticity and fill up a form listing out damages on the car and summarizing its condition. Based on this inspection report the insurer makes a decision to underwrite a motor insurance policy on the car.

There still remain a few problems…

  1. Self inspection apps are difficult to use for an untrained user, resulting in the need for a car owner to try multiple times before a “satisfactory” inspection is recorded
  2. A team of people at the insurer’s end need to review the images or videos and manually generate an inspection report
  3. There is no simple way the damages identified on a vehicle are digitally recorded so they can be used by the insurer’s claims assessment team in the future

Making self-inspections simpler

ClearQuote weblink offers guided image capture

ClearQuote provides easy to use mobile apps and more importantly a weblink that can be sent to car owners to carry out self inspections.

Whats different — for starters, no downloads required. The weblink can be sent via SMS or email and stays valid for a specified period of time.

More importantly, the link offers a guided inspection process for the car owner —

  1. Silhouettes of various sections of the car are shown when the user starts capturing images in camera screen — to make image capture really simple
  2. Real time AI enabled detection checks if the images taken by the user are the right ones. This ensures that if a user captures a wrong image, the user will be immediately asked to retake. Wrong images could include incorrect parts of the car, poor lighting conditions etc.
ClearQuote real-time AI ensures wrong images are identified in real time

Images need to be captured live and the user will be unable to upload saved images, nor can the user upload images taken under poor lighting conditions (for e.g. in a basement parking lot).

Automated damage assessment

Once the images are captured, they are processed automatically on the cloud using ClearQuote AI to identify the vehicle condition and all the damages on the vehicle.

ClearQuote vehicle damage assessment

Damages to 100+ parts on the exterior of the car are identified and the extent of damage is assessed with a high degree of accuracy.

All essential fraud checks are also carried out automatically — based on GPS coordinates and vehicle documentation (license plate, VIN plate, RC card, insurance policy etc).

Truly digital vehicle condition assessment

The final “report” that is generated is much more than the usual PDF document that inspection agencies provide.

Every single damage identified on the vehicle is captured and digitally documented — as “pre-existing damages” and stored in a format which is easy to compare automatically if and when there is a accident claim in the future. Ger more details here. This makes downstream claim processing a lot easier than the current manual process.

ClearQuote damage assessment

ClearQuote is available as whitelabel apps (and weblink) as well as APIs for insurers who have their own self inspection apps already.

Write to us at hello@clearquote.io if you are an insurer looking to make your break-in inspection process simple and efficient.

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