DentBetty
Car Repair Estimates by Photo
Why drive around town for repair estimates? Now you can upload photos of your car's cosmetic damage and make the autobody shops near and far compete for your business.
DentBetty Inside and Out
DentBetty is purposely designed to be extremely easy to use. Consumers simply enter their zip code, upload at least 2 photos of their car's damage, and fill in some other very brief information. Then whenever an autobody shop makes an estimate, the consumer receives an email notification and can return to the website to review all of the estimates together before deciding which vendor to make an appointment with. The DentBetty Quality Scoreboard "DBQS" keeps a running record of consumer feedback and other information to give consumers confidence in each vendor's reputation. When the consumer selects a bid, he then views the shops contact information and can call directly to schedule an appointment.
The consumer simply enters his zip code and the site searches to see if there are at least 3 participating shops within driving distance. If there are, then the consumer sees a form to fill out which requires at least 2 and up to 8 photos of the car's damage. Instructions for how to take dent photos with sufficient clarity that the estimators require are also on the website.
Whenever a new estimate request is made, Bettynet member shops are notified by email (and soon SMS text message). Similarly, consumers are notified by email every time a shop makes a new estimate for them.
By clicking on their personal link in the emails they receive, consumers can go to their personal estimate page where all estimates are gathered for them and presented in an attractive DentBetty style.
DentBetty doesn't promise consumers that they'll get 100's of estimates. Many quality shops do not want to take the time to give you a free estimate if their effort is buried in a large stack of nondistinguished competitors. It only takes them a minute to make an estimate on DentBetty, but that still is some time. And meanwhile, most consumers prefer not to have to evaluate a lot of estimates either. Too many choices can be overwhelming.
We found that by establishing a maximum of 7 estimates, most people's preferences were accommodated and the shops could all have a reasonable expectation of winning often enough to merit the effort. Most estimate requests will end up with somewhere between 3 and 7 estimates.
Our research demonstrates that price is really not the most important factor to most consumers. Each estimate includes details such as distance to the shop, how quickly they can complete the repair, whether pickup/delivery is included, how confident the shop is in their estimate, and a variety of other information that is very important.
Consumers are especially interested to learn about the quality of a shop's repairs before making a decision. For any particular repair, a shop can indicate what level of quality it can provide in a custom comment field that is associated with each estimate. For a more general sense of the overall cleanliness and professionalism of their operation, the shop also has the opportunity to include a photo and video of their procedures.
Further, the DentBetty Quality Scoreboard ("DBQS") gives shops a chance to build a superlative online reputation by reporting reviews that consumers give them. It is like a baseball card of quantitative information that tracks estimate quality and consumer surveys.
The DentBetty platform is designed to be semi-transparent. While every estimate is presented with more than enough detail about shops to make an informed selection, shops are not required to reveal their identity to the consumer on each bid. Many do brand their estimates however - each case is different. There is a lot of room for shops to experiment with different strategies according to their needs and current business conditions.
BettyNet: The Auto Body Shop's Dashboard
DentBetty's staff establishes every shop's quality before approving their application. Those that meet DentBetty’s rigorous standards become members of Bettynet - the DentBetty Network - and get notified every time a new consumer within driving distance of their shop requests an estimate. The technician can then review every car that is waiting for estimate at his convenience by simply going to his personal Dashboard, his control center for all actions on the network.
The technician can zoom in on every photo for closer inspection.
DentBetty's staff prescreens every photo to make certain that each request is a legitimate consumer, not just some teenager having fun with his camera.
Not every dent is easy to estimate by photograph alone. Some require physical inspection to see if there is structural damage. Body shops can indicate their level of confidence using the Caveat Controller - telling the consumer if they are Very Confident, Pretty Sure, or this one is Tough to Estimate.
The shops have seven days before any request is considered closed, but most shops tend to respond within 24 hours. Each estimate takes less than two minutes because the information is all presented in an organized form.
Behind The Scenes
The task of managing thousands of body shops and millions of consumer requests requires a sophisticated administration infrastructure. DentBetty has built an impressive scalable distributed server architecture with a variety of reports and monitoring tools for our staff that is necessary to make sure the service runs smoothly without interruption. A plethora of market research is gathered and analyzed on every single request and every mouseclick so that the site can iterate and be optimized for consumers and body shops alike. A number of proprietary tools that enhance the functionality and facilitate future development are not displayed here.
Back to:
Press Kit page
Download a PDF of this Press Kit:
Follow us on Twitter and Facebook
