By Ben Shure

The rental car industry is back to being one of the biggest rental industries in the United States after it took a dip during the COVID pandemic. Customer service, especially over the phone, is a huge part of this industry. Customers typically decide where they will rent their cars from based on the experience they have interacting with the company’s employees and nothing else. Because of the dip in business that many car rental companies had during the pandemic, many of these companies were forced to shorten their staff. Now that the car rental industry is back to where it used to be or even bigger with more people looking to travel after they couldn’t during the Pandemic, many of these car rental companies don’t have the staff or technology to correctly deal with the current influx of customer requests.

With the way things are currently, a customer will call a rental car company and have to provide all of their information and potentially even information on the car that they rented. This process takes away time that employees at these companies need to deal with other customers and can cause these employees to have to rush through other parts of their work and make careless mistakes. Some examples of the problems that have occurred at these companies are billing errors, cars not being available even when they were pre-booked, customers not receiving clean cars, and slow service.

If a rental car company were to partner with Cloudonix, all of these issues could be improved upon. Car rental companies would be able to use Cloudonix’s call center technology to trace exactly which customer would be calling and about what rental car they would be calling about. This would save a ton of time overall that would otherwise be spent listening to customers say this information on the phone. Employees at these companies could spend this saved time on looking over customer bills more carefully, making sure cars they are offering are actually in their inventory, and cleaning all of their cars to the standard that they promise to customers. 

Using Cloudonix’s web calling technology could also potentially save these rental car companies money. Instead of having to pay an unexpected per minute phone bill for all the calls they have with customers, they could instead pay a flat rate for the web based calling that they agree to before the billing period.

Another feature that rental car companies could add to their cars if they partnered with Cloudonix is a service like GM Onstar™ . GM Onstar is a button on the dashboard that the customer can press to get directly in contact with the rental company or local towing and emergency services. This provides an added level of security for the customers and doesn’t make the unfortunate situation of a crash or car issue as stressful as it might otherwise be if the customer had to use their phone to figure out who to get in contact with. Because this button would likely make customers feel safer, they would be more likely to rent from the companies that Cloudonix would be partnered with. Cloudonix would not only clean up many of the issues that exist at car rental companies today, but it would help these companies to bring in more customers.

Source: https://getjerry.com/insights/customer-service-rental-car-industry-seems-low