Automotive rental services, recreational vehicles rentals are evolving by the day. Challenges abound for these businesses from multiple perspectives:
(a) Providing a seamless transaction experience for their customers: this involves making reservations a breeze, offering differentiated charges, and extending flexible payment options.
(b) Improving operational visibility: trip allocation, fleet management, maintenance management, GPS integration, all form the critical links to running a lean travel services business.
Right investments in technology can help businesses streamline their operations, with an ROI upward of 80% in less than a year.
There are multiple avenues for technology investments in the travel services domain:
(a) Content Management Systems (CMS): Building an online portal for vehicle reservations involves two specific requirements: sharing content related to rental services, and a robust payment/checkout mechanism. Both these can be accomplished using a content management system. The CMS enables the rental services company to share differentiated offers to various categories of clients, award loyalty points, and ensure that their client’s preferred payment modes are incorporated in their portal.
(b) Custom applications for operations management: Each rental business operates with a local flavour, so having commercial off the shelf solution for managing operations may not be the right choice all the time. A custom application that takes into account the unique needs of the business helps drastically improve ROI.
Such custom applications can:
- Improve fleet allocation, hence assuring vehicle usage
- Comprehensively integrate maintenance management into business operations
(c) Mobile Applications: Mobile apps have become an integral part of all business. With an app, rental businesses extend their reach literally to the fingertips of their clients.
Mobile apps can help clients make bookings, authorize payments, know the geo-location of their vehicles through GPS tracking, and get updates on benefits/schemes rolled out by the rental service provider
Mobile apps can also be leveraged by fleet pilots to know their relative position with respect to refuelling stations and service centres en route.
(d) Dashboards/analytics: Automotive rental businesses generate data at every touch point with their customers. All these data can be used to derive powerful insights such as:
What is the average utilization of vehicles in the fleet?
When is the next service due?
Are there seasonal trends in how clients rent vehicles?
Analytics applications can be used to build custom reports, or informative dashboards what give a snapshot of fleet operations.
The power of technology is waiting to be tapped. For any investment in technology to succeed, the most critical requirement is a solution partner who understands the business. Many a time, despite choosing the best of breed solution platforms, technology investments fail because of a lack of domain expertise on the part of the solution provider.
About Vishwak
Vishwak Solutions is a pioneer in developing robust software solutions for online retail, insurance and travel services domains. We believe in making best use of technology to deliver business solutions that are robust, scalable and cost effective, with quicker time to market.
Vishwak has a deep expertise in CMS, in both proprietary and open source platforms. Our capabilities in the retail domain are further augmented by deep expertise in Microsoft and open source technologies, and being a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, giving us the flexibility to handle end-to-end solution requirements in the retail domain.
Vishwak is headquartered in Seattle, with global delivery units located in Los Angeles and Chennai, India.