Avis Budget Group is a global leader in the rental car industry. In 2019, staff in its Budapest Service Center manually handled 1.7 million email messages and phone calls from customers.
Each day, 278 agents were handling around 60% of these inquiries through email, while 80 agents were handling the remainder on the phone. Most of these queries were simple tasks like asking for copies of invoices, information about a station’s location or clarification on post-rental fees such as traffic offenses.
Pressured by the pandemic
Faced with an increasingly challenging response rate and outstanding queries, the customer service team needed to quickly reduce its call and email volumes for simple questions, so they could focus on the more complex, time-consuming queries. But customer satisfaction had to remain a priority 24/7.
And like many organizations, Avis Budget Group faced several new challenges with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. More customers turned to car rental as a safe and clean form of transportation. In addition, there were constantly changing guidelines and processes, increased customer interactions on the Avis and Budget websites, and rising calls to its Budapest Service Center.
Speedy answers and self-service
Avis Budget Group previously worked with an in-house solution built on keywords, but it couldn’t scale to meet the needs of a growing customer base. Looking for a solution that addressed its current challenges — but also future-proofed its support function — Avis Budget Group opted for the Genesys DX offering to improve the overall customer experience. Avis Budget Group implemented Genesys DX NLP capabilities in its English-speaking support centers first, but plans to roll out in four additional languages.
With Genesys DX, Avis Budget Group can reach its self-service goals by tracking frequently asked questions (FAQs), providing thorough answers and differentiating between queries that need to be escalated to live engagements with subject matter experts — and those that don’t.
