Condé Nast and Deloitte Digital have teamed up to present Digital Acceleration in the Time of COVID, a nine-part series of stories from global business leaders who've charted a path through uncertainty.
Here, Paul Reh, Vice President of Customer Experience, Enterprise talks about addressing customer pain points when the whole world is in distress.
St. Louis, 1957, and Jack Taylor, a decorated Navy vet turned car salesman tried a novel concept: leasing automobiles to local execs. Taylor started with seven cars, and named the new company after the aircraft carrier on which he was stationed in the South Pacific. Today, Enterprise Holdings—owner of the Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National Car Rental, and Alamo Rent A Car brands—and its affiliates manage nearly 1.7 million vehicles with $22.5 billion in global revenue, making it the largest car rental service provider in the world. The brands serve more than 9,500 neighborhood and airport locations in nearly 100 countries. Beyond car rental, the company also offers mobility options like fleet management, car sales, truck rental, car sharing, vanpooling and a subscription service.
Taylor's original credo was simple: Take care of your customers and employees first, and profits will follow. Which is why employees say that despite its size, the company retains the feel of a much smaller organization—an impression confirmed by Paul Reh, vice president of customer experience at Enterprise Holdings. “The Enterprise goal is to be the best and most trusted mobility provider in the world, but it still has the close feel of a family operation.”
It’s a point of view that’s proved critical in navigating the past year. Enterprise, like most travel-related businesses, was blind-sided by the COVID lockdowns. Bookings collapsed in early 2020 as travel came to a standstill. Reh recalls a wrenching conversation with one of his supervisors in the early days of the pandemic. “He said we need to be ready and be strong because this was going to change our business forever,” Reh says. “It was a powerful moment. Not just as just coworkers, but fellow humans. We were on this ship together”
Despite the churn, Enterprise knew they weren’t alone: Enterprise’s customers, too, were under extraordinary personal stress.
Enterprise knew this in part because pre-pandemic they’d been working on a significant customer experience initiative with Deloitte Digital and a broad internal team—including marketing, operations, IT and product—to analyze the ways customers do business with the company and identify more satisfying ways they could serve those customers.
The work had yielded several interesting insights about travel, including: it’s thrilling to plan and book a vacation, but as the anticipated date approaches, customer stress levels can skyrocket.
“There are so many variables in travel,” Reh explains, “and they can cause an incredible amount of anxiety. We know renting a car can be part of that: ‘Did I remember to book a car? Do I need insurance? What kind of car do I need? What’s a ‘standard’ car anyway?’”
In the beforetimes, Reh says, “Customers may also have been tense from a tough family situation or a stressful flight. We can’t do anything about those directly, but we can provide a seamless experience to make sure that renting a car is a great part of their trip.”
Paul Reh
Vice President of Customer Experience, Enterprise
Building on a human connection
The company believes that one critical point of differentiation for its business is its continual focus on removing friction and providing control for the customer. That means leading with empathy—understanding both the heads and hearts of their customers in a more personalized, intuitive (and less transactional) way.
This increased level of empathy for the customer is increasingly considered a business essential. In fact, research shows that organizations that internalize these principles are twice as likely to outperform their peers in revenue growth.
Enterprise’s focus on enhancing the rental experience has taken serious investment, collaboration and fieldwork, including on-site evaluations, customer interviews and focus groups. Enterprise broke the rental experience down into distinct stages, with three focus areas in particular: booking the car, getting the car and returning the car.
“Our goal is to remove the pain points so that we can deliver a frictionless experience that meets each customer’s needs. That only happens when we have a full understanding of the entire customer journey,” Reh says.
The gut-check and the fast-forward
Enterprise may already have been fixated on meeting customers’ unique needs, but the shared COVID experience transformed their understanding of the breadth of life experiences at play. Travel was just one part of these experiences; car rental an even smaller part. And if travel planning had been trying in 2019, by 2020 it could be downright existential. But they also recognized the crisis—and the added insights it provided—could be an opportunity to redouble their efforts.
“COVID accelerated our work,” Reh recalls, “The focus on reimagining and elevating the whole experience was a real fast-forward for us during this time.”
Health and safety, for example, were suddenly paramount like never before—on both sides of the reservation counter. Doing what was right didn’t stop with customers; from the beginning of the crisis, Enterprise prioritized the safety and wellbeing of employees too.
“Our frontline workers are heroes, helping bring to life our customer experience,” Reh explains. “We need their involvement and buy-in. All decisions and changes need to be considered from the operational side of the house.”
Early in the crisis—like so many other businesses—low-contact transactions and providing extra peace of mind became essential. To this end, key steps of the Enterprise rental process were streamlined and digitized; customers could now simply flash a mobile phone with a ReadyPass and get on their way with confidence. Enterprise also partnered with Clorox to provide disinfecting wipes in every vehicle at all locations in the U.S. and Canada; each packet comes with instructions about how to use it on the vehicle’s high-touch, hard non-porous surfaces.
As with anyone, the past year has been more than challenging for Enterprise. But the company is quick to note its work goes well-beyond COVID. It’s keeping its eyes on the future as it looks to lead the charge in delivering a frictionless rental experience, grounded in the strong customer service and human connections the company was founded on.
Somewhere, Jack Taylor is nodding in agreement.
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