Enterprise Rent-A-Car

Group - 9
Background Enterprise Rent-A-Car, founded in 1957 by Jack Taylor, is a car rental company headquartered in Clayton, Missouri, United States. There primary focus is in car rentals to those customers who need a replacement car because of an accident, mechanical repair, theft etc. The did this through the help of insurance agent and body-shop managers as referral agents. As the whole company was operating on the philosophy that if company took care of its customers and employees first, profits would follow and so it highly valued customer satisfaction and was carefl to track it. The Problem They used to track customer satisfaction with the help of an independent company through a survey which was sent to a randomly selected 1 in 20 customers by mail. On the basis of feedback they received they developed an Enterprise Service Quality Index (ESQi) which not only helped in monitoring customer satisfaction but also helped in monitoring individual branch performance. The issue was they only got a 25 percent response rate and were concerned that they were missing out on important information and sometimes used to take two months to get the result back which hampered there efficiency in resolving customer issues and increased there turnaround time. Possible Alternatives 1. Increase in Sample Size: Instead of sending it to 1 in 20 customers, they can send it to 1 in 4 customers. By the response rate of 25%, they will get much more information and will get much clearer picture about the performance of the company. 2. Online Survey: Instead of sending the survey in mail, we can computerize the whole process and send the survey link through email. Through this we can cover a wider base of customers and time to collate and analyze the data will also reduce significantly. 3. On the Spot Survey: We can ask the customers for their feedback at the time when they are returning the rental car through the help of PDAs or Tablets. This way customer feedback response will be much more accurate about their experience, survey data can be sent directly to third party for analysis and will reduce companys turnaround time. 4. Computer Aided Telephonic Interviews/Personal Interviews: We can get much more detailed information. 5. Mobile Applications: We can use mobile applications to optimize the whole process from reservation to customer feedback. As around 55% of population is using smartphones, we can also provide some incentives on using the mobile application. Using GPS based

technology, customers can get to know about the nearest Enterprise office and reserve a car directly on mobile. At the time of return of the car rental, they can give their feedback on their mobiles only.

Recommended Solution We believe that getting the feedback at the time of returning the vehicle will be a better approach. As this will ensure timely response as well as since the customer experience is fresh and new he will be able to answer more accurately. By this method, we can control the sample as required, analyze data in a faster and much more efficient manner and thus will improve on feedback response rate. Also, Enterprise can go for additional personal interviews with customers to get more information that may have been missed out during the questionnaire.