Free2move North America: Higher Claims Success with AI-Based Damage Detection
The basic prerequisite for the development of sustainable, modern mobility services is their economic viability. Only if these services are profitable in the long term can they change mobility as such.
So far, damage has played too great an economic role. Today, providers of sharing services have to spend up to 10% of their turnover on repairing damage to their vehicles – which is often enough to make a service unprofitable overall. Especially if the fleet operator is stuck with the damage. This makes a high success rate for claims for damages all the more important.
Who did it?
Damage to the fleet is also a problem for Free2move, one of the largest car sharing operators in Europe and North America: “In the past, damage detection almost exclusively relied on someone external reporting damage to us, either the customer directly involved in an incident or a customer reporting a damage from a previous rental,” says Clemens Schönberger, Director of Operations at Free2move North America. “Especially with previous damages this resulted in a huge challenge and overall we estimate to only have been able to assign damages to about 30% of all cases. And even if it was possible to identify the causer, it was a manual, time-consuming and labor-intensive process.”
Many car sharers ask every one of their drivers to take pictures of the vehicle first in order to detect damages caused by the previous driver. But not only is this method unreliable due to bad photographs or undetected hidden damages. It also disturbs the Customer Journey so massively that, in reality, most drivers skip this step if possible.
There can only be one solution: damage must be detected and reported automatically and in real time. The damage detection system from carvaloo uses high-resolution acceleration data and highly trained AI algorithms. Up to 95% of external damage to a vehicle is reliably detected in this way.
Two levers for greater cost-effectiveness
In the regular operation of a mobility service, there are two levers for more successful claims: the assignment of the party responsible for the damage (assignment rate) and the success in enforcing the claim (enforcement rate).
Assignment Rate
carvaloo helps to boost the assignment rate by reliably matching any damage event to a specific driving anomaly, including an exact time-stamp and optionally the precise geo-location of the impact. By automatically matching the damage event with the respective booking, identifying the causer of the damage becomes a piece of cake.
Simultaneously, since carvaloo also detects impacts when the car is parked and not running, it becomes a powerful tool to exonerate drivers for damages that occurred during their booking but without them being responsible, thus increasing fairness and customer satisfaction.
Enforcement Rate
Once a damage is correctly assigned to the person who caused it, carvaloo also helps to enforce the claim. By providing a detailed damage report with context information, pictures of the damage and the exact time and place of the incident, causers of damages usually don’t deny the allegations and insurance companies are less likely to get in the way if the burden of proof is correspondingly high.
“We’ve seen a dramatic improvement in our claims success rate since implementing carvaloo’s technology,” says Schönberger. “Not only in terms of clearly assigning the vehicle to a rental, but also in terms of the quality of data that we have available to use for insurance and subrogation claims. Previously, we struggled to prove the extent of damages to our vehicles, leading to disputes and delays in reimbursement. With carvaloo, we now have concrete data to support claims, resulting in faster resolutions. Ultimately having a transparent process driven by technology that ensures damages to our vehicles are properly managed, not only reduces cost but also results in greater peace of mind for our customers.”
Profitability is Key
Everyone wants sustainable, forward-looking mobility concepts. And many of these are now being developed. The innovative strength and diversity in the area of shared mobility are strong. However, in order for these services to survive on the market and remain strong alternatives to traditional services in the future, their operation must be lean.
Damage handling is no exception – with reliable, automated damage detection, services not only become safer and fairer, but also economically profitable.