A shared screen is still an employee screen
Remote quote conversations often begin with a reasonable request: can the customer see the choices change while the employee explains them? Conventional screen sharing answers by broadcasting whatever is on the employee’s display. That is convenient until a notification appears, an internal note becomes visible, or the employee needs to open a control panel that has no place in the customer conversation.
Cropping the window does not create a trustworthy boundary. It asks the employee to remember which parts of a working surface are safe at every moment. It also gives the customer a busy operating screen when what they actually need is a calm view of the vehicle, the selected structure, and the few choices under discussion. The product problem was therefore not ‘make screen sharing prettier.’ It was ‘publish a different surface.’
The projection is a product, not a mirror
LotPro’s Live Quote proof of concept treats the customer view as a separate application boundary. The staff side prepares a server-sanitized projection containing approved presentation fields. The guest joins a temporary session and receives that projection rather than the dealership document that produced it. Staff controls, internal working notes, permissions, and arbitrary free text do not become public simply because the quote is being discussed remotely.
The same separation applies to collaboration. Durable session controls are distinct from short-lived presence, pointers, and annotations. That lets the guest follow what the employee is pointing at without turning a gesture into a permanent part of the deal record. A fixed safe label such as GAP can survive the sanitizer; arbitrary labels are generalized rather than trusted. The design assumes that publication is an explicit act, not an accidental side effect of editing.
- A server-written, customer-safe projection instead of the staff document
- Temporary guest access that can expire or be revoked
- Host controls kept on the dealership side
- Transient collaboration separated from durable quote state
Why the narrower view is more useful
The customer does not lose anything required to make the immediate choice. In fact, removing editing chrome and internal machinery makes the comparison easier to read. The employee can change an approved option, republish the customer-safe state, and use a pointer or annotation to keep both sides oriented. The customer sees the decision moving; the employee retains the workspace needed to shape it.
That distinction also makes the experience easier to explain. A dealership can say, truthfully, that the link is a temporary presentation, not remote access to its system. The interaction has a beginning, an owner, and an end. If the conversation stops, access can stop with it. The customer surface is deliberately less powerful because its job is understanding, not administration.
What we refused to fake
The proof of concept does not put customer or employee data into public demonstrations. It does not rely on hiding sensitive controls with CSS. It does not permit unrestricted anonymous writes, and it does not claim that every quote field is safe to publish. The projection must be derived and sanitized on the server, and the public interface must remain useful even when a field is withheld.
Those constraints cost more engineering than broadcasting a browser tab, but they produce the result the feature is meant to sell: a customer can follow the choice without inheriting the dealership’s private screen. Privacy is not an after-the-fact warning around the collaboration experience. It is the reason the experience has two surfaces.
Where the build stands
Live Quote is a private preview, not a generally available remote-quoting product. An isolated client, temporary-session model, sanitized projection path, and collaboration controls have been built and exercised as a proof of concept. Production rollout still requires dealership-specific onboarding, complete end-to-end validation, operating controls, and review of every field that can cross the boundary.
That status matters. The idea is no longer a mockup, but the evidence does not support promising universal availability. Early access is for teams willing to validate the workflow with sample data first and help turn a careful boundary into a dependable operating feature.