LTM helps one of the world’s leading car rental companies to enable contactless rentals

Context:

The client is a multi-brand global mobility solutions provider with more than 5000 rental locations across 165 countries. In the wake of covid-19, car rental, like other sectors in the travel & hospitality industry, saw a huge decline in global demand for bookings leading to an unprecedented decline in revenues. While the industry as a whole is trying to recover from the pandemic, our client’s business leaders wanted to instill trust and confidence in their customers by ensuring that their rental car pickup is safe, quick, and easy. As new protocols were being unveiled at rental counters for customer & employee safety, as well as for vehicle cleaning; the client team also wanted to fine tune their traditional rental customer journey to minimize physical interactions during the rental pickup.

The Challenge:

• The traditional rental pickup process requires handing over of identification documents to the agent, which is a safety concern for the customers and employees.
• Manpower reduction at the rental counters lead to the longer processing time.
• Increase in car theft and other frauds due to identity validation challenges during the pickup.
• Drop in ancillary sales at the rental counter.
• Significant increase in ‘No Shows’ causing operational and demand planning challenges as the client was operating with a reduced fleet capacity.

Our Approach:

The client reached out to LTM - their tried-and-tested digital partner of to help them achieve the goal of contactless rental pickup.

As a first step, LTM’s business analysts worked with multiple business teams - operations, digital & channel marketing, partner sales, etc. to understand the business strategy and then re-defined the rental customer journey to optimize it for a contactless experience. Working in collaboration with the client product managers, we created a product roadmap for contactless rental.

Working with business stakeholders, leads of impacted systems, and third party vendors, we finalized the scope for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which can go to market within the shortest time, and also laid the foundation for future product development.

Our team created prototypes and conducted demos of the new concept to enable the client’s sales team to market and increase product adoption among their partners and online travel agents.

Simultaneously, our technical leads shouldered the responsibility with the client’s architects to finalize the solution, which maximizes the reuse of existing services, templates, and components.

Our program management team leveraged cross-geo learnings to ensure a successful roll out across North America, APAC, and EMEA though the platforms, systems, teams and processes were disparate across these regions.

We fast-tracked development to ensure MVP roll out within a short window of 4 weeks across geographies and multiple brands. We also supported the client’s marketing & operations business proactively by sharing actionable data insights for product marketing and streaming rental counter operations to maximize benefits from the program.

• Advance online check-in
• Online Car & Ancillary Upsell
• Digital Identity Validation 
• Contactless Card Payment 
• BYOD for Signature Capture 

Impact:

• An initial MVP was launched in the second quarter of 2020 with the online check-in feature; making the client one of the early adopters of contactless feature in the car rental industry.
• New safety protocols were implemented, plus the ability to process rental pickup without document exchange led to a higher sense of safety and customer satisfaction scores. 
• Approximately 10% of the customers opted for online check-in during the initial weeks of the roll out.
• Achieved 15% reduction in processing time at the rental counter.
•  Reduced ‘No Show’ count among customers who opted for online check-in.

Solution Summary:

Our solution offered a low contact rental experience by replacing the traditional in-person check in with a digital journey built as an extension of the booking process.

• Advance Check-in: A highly intuitive check-in process facilitates the upload of driving license by mobile scan and captures payment details during online check-in, which leads to bypassing card swipe at the counter.
• Personalized product upsell during web check-in: The solution facilitates direct and indirect customers to enhance their rental experience by choosing from personalized ancillary offers before confirming their check-in. The offerings are customized to comply with travel policies/contractual agreements of each customer segment.
•  Currency localization: Catering to the wider geographies, the devised solution augments currency conversion for outbound bookings based on recent exchange rates.
• Digital identity verification: Integration with 3rd party vendor to validate the driving license provided by the customer and perform identity check to avoid the need for a rental agent to manually validate the driving license.
• On-premise check: Facilitates end customer’s document verification in real time by integrating rental agent’s hand-held device with the 3rd party identity validation services.
• E-signature solution: Developed e-signature service, which facilitates electronic signature for the Rental Agreement on the customers’ mobile device, thereby eliminating the need to stop at the rental counter for a manual signature.