Driving efficiency with natural language processing

Rental car giant Avis Budget Group needed to rev up its customer response times and shift its internal productivity into high gear. With the natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of the Genesys DX™ solution, self-service now handles 30% of customer inquiries. And these inquiries are answered faster and more efficiently with 24/7 support.

30% of inquiries

handled with self-service

24/7 cost effective

support

Faster answers

to customer queries

Improved

efficiency

By introducing Genesys DX, we are aiming to speed up customer wait times, reduce the number of calls coming through to our agents, and enable our agents to spend their time answering more complex and time-consuming customer queries.

Edoardo Peniche

Vice President

Budapest Service Center at Avis Budget Group

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.

The offering also tracks the voice of the customer, adding an element of agility. This enables the team to track what customers ask in real time — understand how external circumstances affect this in the future — and adapt FAQs to meet those needs. Customers can handle 30% of their inquiries through self-service, which ensures they feel taken care of based on their current needs — while also receiving faster answers to their queries.

“By introducing Genesys DX, we are aiming to speed up customer wait times, reduce the number of calls coming through to our agents, and enable our agents to spend their time answering more complex and time-consuming customer queries,” said Edoardo Peniche, Vice President, Budapest Service Center at Avis Budget Group. “We want the entire rental experience to be as smooth and seamless as possible, so we’ve identified the most frequently asked questions and made the answers readily available on our websites.”

The capability of Genesys DX to help employees and internal support teams reclaim productive work hours to focus on more strategic initiatives and higher value work directly matched the Avis Budget Group objective of adopting technology to help move the business forward. And customers looking for human-assisted support can still speak with an agent through a live chat via email or phone. This allows the company to solve the biggest sources of customer frustration.

Finding success in any language

Genesys DX allows Avis Budget Group to approach customer service from a broader perspective; the business views the Genesys solution as critical to its success.

The Avis Budget Group team faced the challenge of providing 24/7 support to customers across different time zones and in various languages. With the deployment of Genesys DX in English across 10 different websites and in five European regions, including the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, it has allowed the most trafficked part of the business to resolve questions faster — and improved efficiencies for the Avis Budget Group team.

With demand increasing, Avis Budget Group will roll out Genesys DX in Italian, German, Spanish and French to ensure customers can access information in their native languages whenever they need it.

At a glance

Industry: Car rental

Location: Hungary

Company size: 278 agents

Challenges

  • Increasing customer calls and emails
  • Low response rates
  • Unresolved queries

Product

Genesys DX

Capabilities

Chatbot