As more and more contactless rental providers enter the market, distributors find themselves at a crossroads about how to approach the shifting landscape of mediating a car rental booking.

Gone are the days when distributors would merely provide customers with a voucher and consider their job done. The introduction of contactless rentals has extended customers' digital rental journey beyond just making a booking. In fact, it often continues by downloading a car rental company app, creating an account, finding their booking and completing their ID verification. Therefore, designing the customer journey from booking to car pick-up demands careful planning while keeping a constant focus on the customer’s needs.

Working Together for Customer Satisfaction

To prevent negative customer experiences or outright failures, distributors and contactless rental companies must work together. It's essential to establish clear roles for those who will guide consumers through the rental process to ensure customer satisfaction.

As a platform that connects numerous online car rental distributors with contactless rental providers, Car Rental Gateway is keenly aware of the issues that can arise when the contactless rental journey and customer communication touchpoints are not efficiently streamlined between partners.

For example, what will happen if the customer misses the deadline to verify their ID, the distributor doesn’t provide the customer with sufficient information about the next steps in the rental process, or the customer is directed to an English website despite having made the original booking in another language on the distributor’s site? All these issues boil down to insufficient communication between car rental distributors and rental providers.

Suggestions to Improve the Rental Experience

Here are seven suggestions on how to improve the customer experience and success of contactless rental transactions:

1. Everything starts with the product display and personalisation on the distributor's website. Contactless rental is a fairly new concept that can mean different things depending on the provider. Therefore, it's paramount to educate customers and make it abundantly clear what they can expect from the service. Will they be using an app-based service, a kiosk for car key collection, or something else?

2. Add labels, product descriptions, or easily recognizable icons to draw attention to the fact that the service is contactless.
   Clearly labelling the service as such might also lead to higher conversion rates because customers are starting to favor contactless options over "traditional" ones. 

   

3. Introduce a filter on your website to allow customers to search specifically for contactless offers.

4. Add a call to action on the booking confirmation page to encourage customers to complete the necessary steps for ID verification, such as downloading the supplier app. By providing a convenient and streamlined process for customers, they can take all the necessary actions in one sequence without having to search through their emails at a later time.

5. Understand your partner's rental journey and agree on the communication flow, including whose responsibility it is to notify the customer to make sure they will not miss any necessary steps for completing their rental journey.

6. Make sure all the parties in

   

   volved agree on booking cancellation and modification processes and how they will be communicated to the customer. This will help to avoid contradictory booking information from the partners that may later cause customer issues.

7. Automate information exchange. Innovative smart rental companies, like Virtuo and Liigu, have already proven thatpartnerships between contactless rental providers and distributors can work seamlessly with the introduction of webhooks. A webhook is a way for one application to send automated messages or data to another application in real-time when a specific event occurs. This allows distributors to gain a more or less comprehensive overview of customers' rental journeys. The distributor will be informed once the customer has downloaded the app and successfully verified their ID. The intention behind all of this is to provide better customer service and allow distributors to interact with service users at the point where they're most likely to need support.

Seamless Transition from Distributor to Rental Company

Contactless rental will make the whole process of renting a vehicle much faster, easier, and decidedly more customer-friendly. However, these positive effects become more noticeable only if the whole rental experience is seamless and "just works".

Based on our nearly 20 years of experience in the industry, we've observed that setbacks in the rental journey most commonly occur when customers move from the distributor's website to the rental provider's platform. Often, the underlying reason for these setbacks is poor communication between distributor and rental provider, aggravated by a limited understanding of how the entire contactless rental journey looks from the customer’s perspective.

Taking these seven steps will help car rental providers and distributors guide users through the contactless rental journey more smoothly and allow customers to enjoy the convenience of the service as it was intended.

Hannes Põldvee is a product and sales initiator at Car Rental Gateway, a Saas platform that connects people with sustainable mobility services. Car Rental Gateway enables independent partnerships between tens of distributors and over 160 vehicle operators and is pioneering industry shift toward smart rentals with a new product - Titanium Mobility.