Carglass

Find out how we helped Carglass® reduce the data entry burden with OCR technology.

Improving Carglass®’ online booking flow with OCR technology

Carglass® is a trusted name in the automotive glass industry, offering innovative solutions to customers worldwide. Their dedicated team of professionals utilizes state-of-the-art equipment and techniques to deliver exceptional service to their customers. Carglass® is part of Belron®, the world's leading vehicle glass repair and replacement group, operating in 37 countries across 6 continents, and home to around 29,000 employees, who served 15 million customers in 2022.

Results of this partnership

Success rate for license plate recognition.

Success rate for recognition of Vehicle Identification Number.

mobile users use their OCR functionality when booking an appointment for a windscreen replacement.

98%

Success rate for license plate recognition.

100%

Success rate for recognition of Vehicle Identification Number.

12%

mobile users use their OCR functionality when booking an appointment for a windscreen replacement.

The Challenge

As Carglass®' website partner, we are committed to working together to continuously improve the user experience and reduce friction for customers.

One area that we identified for improvement was the amount of information that customers were required to provide when making an appointment for glass damage on the Carglass® website.

This included data from the green insurance card and the pink registration card, which is crucial for Carglass® to determine the vehicle type and brand, and to ensure that the necessary parts are on hand to provide a window replacement.

With over 60% of Carglass® customers using mobile devices and the booking flow being the most important aspect for them, Carglass® was looking for a way to simplify this process and reduce the burden on the customer.

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The solution

We made the process easier for the Carglass® customer by integrating optical character recognition (OCR) into their website. We also made some small manual tweaks for "special" license plates.

As OCR Technology we chose Google Cloud Vision. Google Cloud Vision automatically fills in both the license plate and the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) by extracting the data from a photo taken by the customer of the registration document of the vehicle.

After a short testing period, the results were impressive, with a 98% success ratio for recognizing the license plate and 100% for recognizing the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) on the registration document.

Furthermore, already 12% of mobile users use the OCR functionality when booking an appointment for their windscreen replacement.

However, to ensure a smooth transition, customers still have the option to manually fill in the information or take a photo of the registration document.

The integration of OCR technology significantly reduces the error rate and leads to smoother and more efficient form completion. This results in increased conversions and improved user experience for Carglass®.

The great advantage of OCR is that they immediately have access to the correct data, which has a significant positive impact on their logistics and operational process. The correct window is instantly available at the appointment.

In the future, Carglass® plans to apply OCR to even more fields in the booking flow such as the insurance company, the name and address of the insurance holder, etc.

With Carglass®, we are always looking for innovative technology to improve our customer journey and automate our processes. OCR is a huge improvement in the user experience for our mobile visitors. The reference understood our challenge and need perfectly. They were our trusted partner throughout the entire process, from research to implementation.

Steven Audoor, digital customer journey manager Carglass®

How we made this work

Clear Proof of Concept

Initially, we started with another OCR technology for this project, Amazon Textract. We began with a POC (Proof of Concept) for this technology and ran it for a certain period.

This produced recognition rates of 95% for license plates and 70% for Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN). Both we and Carglass® found these rates insufficient, leading us to switch to Google Cloud Vision for better results.

The integration of OCR technology for Carglass® leads to smoother and more efficient form completion, resulting in increased conversions and improved user experience.

Thomas De Vos, Innovation Strategist

infographic illustrating the MACH architecture and its components

Our solution is fully supported by the MACH principle. On the one hand, it is cloud-native, which offers scalability, security, and reliable performance, all while reducing maintenance costs.

On the other hand, MACH's API-first and headless approach ensures that our solution remains flexible and adaptable to meet the evolving needs of Carglass®. For example, we chose to integrate the Google Cloud Vision API for OCR recognition but retain the option to switch to alternative OCR services if needed.

The services that made this happen

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