The power of knowing how to delight your customers and how AI can help unlock new insights.
In our blogs so far, we’ve covered two key challenges of the car rental industry: firstly why the car rental market needs to be disrupted/transformed (if you missed it you can read the blog here) and secondly the challenges that rental companies face in managing their fleet and keeping a balance between supply and demand (read it here).
At Coastr, we’re addressing these key challenges, along with many others that the industry and our customers are facing. Our biggest bet is on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to unlock the potential of data in delivering a superior and engaging experience to our customers and car rental partners.
You may have heard stories of how car rental companies are delivering one-on-one experiences, tailoring each customers’ journey across channels and increasing response rates and loyalty while keeping control over spend. This is true, but most who have invested in these areas have not seen the returns they hoped for at scale, because until now we did not have the power of machine learning algorithms which can find patterns and insights - something that can easily be missed by the human brain.
It’s important to understand that customers today are time challenged with too many choices. How would they know if they are picking up the right car, with the right insurance? Could they possibly get a better deal elsewhere? Choices can be paralysing.
Added to this, with the ubiquity of mobile technology enabled by 4G internet, customers are bombarded with overwhelming amount of information such as offers from car rental sites, price-comparison, third-party research, news, reviews, blogs and more. Our research suggest that majority of car rental companies are still following traditional data analytics and marketing approaches, presenting customer with as many choices as possible, delivering more content via every possible channel, which only serves to make the customers more confused.
Coastr’s AI enabled car rental platform is committed to delivering personalisation at scale for customers. Our approach is simple. We only showcase options that are relevant to the customer, delivering tailored content which is orchestrated and optimised over channels, recipient and journey. We use data as the differentiator, collecting and assimilating various data points that our AI engine will process and keep learning about a customer’s preferences.
With help of data and the 4R approach, Coastr’s car rental platform Recognises its customers, identifying between known, unknown and prospective customers. Our platform Remembers the choices made by our customers and their experiences, along with the details of why those decisions were made. Our AI engine enables our customers to select what they want, how they want and when they want, but we can Recommend whenever a customer needs help. Last but not the least, we keep everything Relevant to our customers.
This creates a win-win situation for both our customers and our partners. Customers get a customised offering without the hassle of finding the right combination themselves and partners benefit from end-to-end management of their fleet-on-rent and happy customers.
We are currently training our AI engine to curate a seamless personalised experience for each customer and staff member of a car rental company, bringing transparency in pricing, understanding customer delights and many other use cases that will continue to enhance customer and staff experience of using our platform.
Drive safe, stay healthy and if you want to know more about our platform, please connect with the team at www.coastr.com or follow us on social media channels.
Article written by: Rishabh Makrand with contributions from Akash Bajpai