Whether you’re listing the condition of cars available for sale to boost transparency with your customers or you need a log of all the damages associated with your rental and loaner cars, condition reporting is a helpful, if not necessary, tool. Once upon a time, condition reporting was often handled with a telephone call and logged on a paper chart or spreadsheet, but thanks to today’s technology, it has become far simpler and much more accurate.

Determining Value

For cars out on the lot, knowing their condition will help you sell them at a fair price. Better still, if you list the car’s condition, you are making it simpler for your customers to do their research – something they will appreciate a great deal. Instead of answering individual phone calls, you can list the condition online and save everyone plenty of time and hassle. Improving convenience for your customers helps you build trust, and that sells more cars. 

Tracking Damage to Rentals or Loaners

If you rent cars to travelers, or if you provide loaners to your customers while their cars are being repaired, you will need a way to track any damages that occur. Telephone calls to report damage were once the industry standard, but these are inaccurate at best and provide absolutely no proof of when the damage occurred. Today, condition reporting of this nature can be conducted via video. Every time a car leaves your lot with a customer, take a video, and then take another as soon as the customer brings the car back. This way, there is absolutely no question of when damage happened or who was responsible. 

Preventing False Claims

Though it is important to give people the benefit of the doubt, in today’s world, it is not uncommon for customers to claim that a service team damaged their vehicles while they were being repaired. Things like scratches and dents that were present when the car was brought into the service center are not your company’s responsibility, but now more than ever, dealers must be able to prove it. Video condition reports are crucial for this reason. If you take a video of every single car that comes in for repair before it is taken into the bay, then take another video as the customer leaves with the car, you have everything you need. 

No More Paper Logs

If there’s one major benefit to the evolution of condition reporting beyond telephone calls, it’s getting rid of paper logs and spreadsheets that are so prone to human error. Videos have time and date stamps that cannot be argued, and they provide the perfect view of an automobile from every single angle, which means paper logs are officially obsolete. You can save thousands upon thousands of dollars by ditching telephone and paper condition reporting for something that’s more transparent. 

If your company is still relying on phone call condition reports, there’s a very good chance that you are losing money. If you’re paying customer claims because you can’t prove you didn’t cause damage, or if your rental and loaner cars are coming back with dents and dings you didn’t notice until it was too late, you’re paying for things you shouldn’t be. Improving your condition reporting methods will put a stop to this right away.