Good service is about making things as easy as possible for the customer. CarTrawler’s technology platform connects millions of travellers with the widest choice, best value, and prices for car rental and other transport options, including taxi, shuttle, rail, and private transfer. If they experience a problem, CarTrawler’s Customer Centre of Excellence is their first point of call.

We talked to David Webb, Director of Operations at CarTrawler, about how they’re making things easier not just for customers but for staff too.

What is your vision for customer service at CarTrawler?

Our vision is to deliver high customer satisfaction for the lowest possible customer effort throughout the customer’s journey with us. Customers want things to be easy – especially in stressful situations. We want to ensure that when a customer picks up the phone or sends an email to ask for help, our team can provide a solution to their problem fast.

This means ensuring that customers can engage with someone, in their native language, who has access to their case history. The first step towards achieving this vision involved bringing outsourced services back in-house to our newly-formed Customer Centre of Excellence (CCE) in Dublin.

What role does technology play in the Customer Centre of Excellence?

A really important one! When we first established the centre in 2015, we could only view details of individual bookings but had no clear view of the entire customer history. So when someone contacted the centre, we couldn’t see if they were a new or returning customer or if they’d experienced similar problems in the past.

Now that we have customer details automatically appear on screen when they contact the centre, this helps to put the agent on the front foot and be more proactive in how they support the customer. If an agent needs help answering a query, they can access a digital library of knowledge articles that covers everything from what to do if a customer loses their credit card to the documentation needed to rent a car.

How has technology helped to simplify customer-facing processes?

We’ve automated a lot of manual processes to make life easier for our agents and to improve the experience for our customers. Our refund process is probably the best example as it involves multiple departments and datasets: we have a much more robust and streamlined process with finance, and marketing is notified so they can remove customers from campaign lists until the refund is complete.

It’s improvements like this that have helped us boost agent productivity at the centre by nearly 20%.

How do you measure the success of the CCE?

Customer satisfaction and customer effort are two key measures of success – and these are improving. We’ve received great reviews on Trustpilot, Google, and Review Centre – and our agents are more engaged.

It can get really hectic at the CCE, particularly during the summer months, so it’s really important that we inject a bit of fun to the working day. We’ve used Chatter to run photo challenges and an Office Olympics contest, encourage people to share ideas about how we can improve our services and we share feedback we receive from customers about agents on our customer feedback Chatter group.

What’s next?

Now that we have better visibility of our customers, we can keep improving and innovating to ensure we deliver the best value and the best customer experience. We recently appointed a Chief Customer Officer, who will champion the needs of the customer at board level.

By replacing standalone booking numbers with holistic customer profiles, organisations can improve the contact centre experience. To find out more about how CarTrawler has boosted satisfaction with a stronger customer focus, simpler processes, and greater agent productivity, read the full success story.

To set you on the path to creating exceptional experiences for your customers, check out our e-book Creating a Connected Customer Experience for insights and tips from leading experts.