Live Chat Services for a car hire company
4×4 Vehicle Hire Ltd was looking for a contact centre that could provide a live chat answering service to convert the visitors to their website into actual customers.
Background:
4×4 Vehicle Hire are a leading UK-based car rental company, offering a nationwide hire service. Their fleet offers a choice of 4 wheel drive cars suitable for every need, although they specialise in Land Rover and Range Rover hire
Through their network of local franchises they offer delivery of their hire cars anywhere in mainland UK. They also offer delivery and collection at the airports. Gatwick, Heathrow, Stansted & Luton, Newcastle, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Belfast and Manchester airports are all within easy reach of their local branches.
To 4×4 Vehicle Hire Ltd quality customer service is extremely important. Recently they were voted the UK’s favourite 4×4 hire company by their customers on the FreeIndex. Their company was rated 4.6 stars by 53 genuine customers.
However, always looking to develop the service to their customers further and open to new technologies, 4×4 Vehicle Hire identified new opportunities to improve their customer service.
Problem:
4×4 Vehicle Hire’s website had been up and running for many years. Over the years, the company had improved the lay-out, the content and the user-friendliness of the website. Their ongoing goal was to make sure the website was not only informative and helpful to its visitors, but would also generate opportunities for the company to capture the details of their prospective customers.
As part of this exercise, 4×4 Vehicle Hire initially implemented a range of tools on the website that would help them get the most out of their website and increase sales. These tools included:
- Putting the phone number on the website in a prominent place, to make it easily accessible for visitors to call.
- Offer a free quotation form on the website, where visitors can insert their personal details in return for a free estimate of their hire requirements.
- Access to a list of frequently asked questions to help answer website visitors’ most common questions.
The above tools were supplemented with ongoing optimisation of the website and paid online advertising. From the analytics of the advertising 4×4 Vehicle Hire could see that their efforts had definitely increased the number of visitors to their website. This had also resulted in more enquiries, but they felt that on many occasions people would not go as far as picking up the phone or filling their details in on the free quotation form. They asked their web developer what they could do to get an insight in the visitors who were not contacting them. This was the moment where their website developer introduced them to eDivert to talk about their Managed Live Chat Solution.
Solution:
eDivert ran a trial for 4×4 Vehicle Hire for a month, to get an idea of the number of visitors that would use the Live Chat Answering Service on their website to seek contact. As part of this set-up, eDivert visited 4×4 Vehicle Hire at their head office. At this meeting, the following was discussed:
- Company requirements for Managed Live Chat
- Basic understanding of what the company does, how processes work, who is in charge of what and so on
- Expected frequently asked questions and answers, for the Live Chat Answering Team
- With regards to the company requirements, 4×4 Vehicle Hire was mainly looking to use the Live Chat Answering Service to answer basic questions of prospective customers, as well as gather details of hire requirements and contact details. It was agreed that eDivert would forward any chats containing contact details on to the relevant person at 4×4 Vehicle Hire, immediately after the chat, so that 4×4 Vehicle could follow up.
- eDivert then asked for more details about the company, including contact details for the different locations of 4×4 Vehicle Hire, the vehicles they rent out, their vehicle hire rates and basic terms and conditions. A profile was created that eDivert uploaded onto their system and that all agents who Answer Live Chat have access to. Upon return of the meeting, a small dedicated team of Live Chat Agents for this particular account, were briefed and trained on the company’s requirements.
- As part of the training, all staff involved in answering Live Chats, were made familiar with the list of frequently asked questions and where to access information about 4×4 Vehicle Hire’s account. They were also informed that if they did not know the answer to a question, to take contact details of the website visitor, so 4×4 Vehicle Hire could follow up directly. In addition, the Live Chat Answering team at eDivert continue to gather new information about 4×4 Vehicle Hire and update the frequently asked questions, to ensure the customer service they provide to prospects continues to be of a high quality.
Conclusion:
eDivert has been working with 4×4 Vehicle Hire since 2014, starting off with answering approximately 50 live chats a month. In 80% of the live chats answered, the eDivert Live Chat Answering Team are able to capture a concrete enquiry, including full contact details.
4×4 Vehicle Hire estimates that about 50% of these enquirers would not have picked up the phone or filled in their online form. Which means that without the Live Chat Answering Service, these enquiries would have been lost.
eDivert provide live chat answering services to businesses throughout the UK, with offices covering Chichester, Ipswich, Birmingham, Kent, Coventry, Liverpool, Wigan, London, Newham, Nuneaton, Maidstone, Folkestone, Bognor Regis, Lichfield, High Wycome, Maidenhead, Reading, Swindon, Gloucester and Cheltenham.
eDivert’s live chat answering service fits in really well with our ethos to provide excellent customer service. It has increased the capture of contact details of our website visitors by at least 20% and as a result increased our sales.”
Riaz, MD of 4×4 Vehicle Hire UK Ltd
