One thing we intend to do on our customer journey is to ease access to the car, with a more autonomous experience available for customers, so they could use their mobile device to open the car, collect the keys from inside the car, and simply drive off. We are already proposing that experience with our Ubeeqo brand in city locations, but over the next few years, we aim to expand that on a much bigger scale. We’ll have more and more presence across cities, but not linked to physical rental stations, and customers will have much more autonomy.

As you can imagine, another important aspect lies in the upcoming ‘connected cars’ revolution and the new uses behind that. We are permanently discussing this with car manufacturers, technology suppliers, and telecommunications companies. Of course, this requires us to have a much greater ‘remote’ understanding of what happens with the car. For instance, understanding whether the customer is facing an accident situation and needs assistance, when a vehicle requires a maintenance activity, to avoid any misunderstanding about the car’s refueling needs and so on. As our rentals will tend to last longer, connectivity will be key for all of that. It means developing new partnerships with manufacturers on connected cars, and also adapting our operations in the field in order to be able to serve the customer accordingly.

¿Necesitará nuevas infraestructuras para ello?

We see our future through the revamp and adjustment of our network “capillarity”, if you know what I mean by that. It’s like the capillaries in your circulatory system - it’s about being present in the right places, adapting our network and type of presence depending on customer needs. 

That doesn’t mean having rental stations everywhere, it’s more about our infrastructure being flexible, developing different platforms at different locations, and building the right model to address customer needs - B2B, B2C, trucks, cars, short duration, long duration etc. Flexibility is the key word for us these days.

You’ve talked about connected cars and that takes us into a huge topic in customer experience: digital transformation. What is your view or vision on that?

At Europcar Mobility Group we have a number of different brands. For example, we have Goldcar which is our entry-level leisure brand. We have our core brand, Europcar, offering short-term vehicle rental, for B2B and B2C segments. We have Ubeeqo, our car sharing brand which I already mentioned, with a strong digital focus. We have local brands, such as Buchbinder, which is one of the largest vehicle providers in Germany. And with each of these brands we have different use cases, and multiple points of contact with the customer. These could be physical or digital, but each of these points of contact is what we call a “moment of truth”.

Now, the issue we face at the moment with digitization is that it’s coming to the point where we have to find the right balance of human interactions to properly support their needs. In other words, the brand tends to be less represented by people whereas we want  to promote loyalty. And that’s a big shift, or challenge, in our relationship with our customer.

We would therefore like to offer what we call an “à la carte customer experience”, where every customer can choose what they want. One customer may want to be autonomous, serve themselves, not meet anyone, pick up the vehicle quickly and go. But another customer may want to meet someone in person, be shown how to operate the car, engage on the specificities of the model or rental arrangement, and so on. That’s the challenge we face today, that even with the individual brands, the customers are not expecting the same things, and we must be able to administer to every customer’s needs. 

Esto significa que, por un lado, estamos avanzando con la digitalización y la automatización, a través de las apps, permitiendo que el cliente sea autónomo y que no tenga que ir al mostrador. Pero, paralelamente, seguimos necesitando tener equipos cualificados tanto en nuestros Contact Center como en las oficinas de alquiler, que puedan entender y atender a los clientes.

And there’s another challenge with meeting every customer’s need and digitization which is that we are present in more or less 140 countries. We’re present in about 20 with our own staff and financials, and in the others we have franchises. There’s a major challenge to manage the customer experience across all these countries – standardizing and harmonizing it worldwide and driving the franchises to move in the same direction at the same speed.

Ese reto de equilibrar la automatización con el contacto humano es un gran desafío en muchos sectores, no sólo en el de la movilidad. ¿Existen otros retos relacionados con la experiencia del cliente que sean especial o específicamente relevantes para la movilidad?

On customer experience, there’s a challenge for our sector on balancing customers’ wish for speed and convenience and their parallel wish for reassurance that everything’s going to be fine with the vehicle. We have to understand and meet the customers’ parallel needs and expectations.

Most customers are accustomed to digitized customer journeys now. They have Amazon and other e-commerce, where they can place an order and be confident that if they don’t like it, they can get a refund. They have Uber or Netflix where everything is done simply at the click of an app. And, as a result, customers replicate their expectations onto other industries and start to expect the same simplicity and quick mobile experience from everywhere.

We are looking to provide that with our own digital CX but the point is that those other industries are not putting a vehicle worth €20,000, or €30,000 or €40,000 into the hands of the customer. In addition, we may also have the issue of the customer’s traffic fines or accidents or damage to the vehicle. It’s not the same as watching a movie on Netflix or hailing a ride or getting a package delivered from Amazon. It’s much more complex. 

¿Cómo se maneja esa complejidad?

I said before that we’re moving from a product-oriented industry to a more customer-oriented industry, and that’s really a cultural change. And in terms of customer experience, we are actually looking at two cultural shifts.

First, we have the customer experience in the field – what we call stations management, the aspects related to waiting time, the administrative paperwork they have to fill in at the station, the checks, the credit card details. We want to change all of that to a quicker, simpler process.

Secondly, we have the less tangible element, the human element – offering them an experience where they don’t have any worries about how anything will work, reassuring them, making them   comfortable that they can drive the car without any problems. 

At the same time, we have to build in those other trends and influences, such as the shift to cleaner vehicles, connected vehicles, and customer behaviour and attitudes to mobility as we start to emerge from the pandemic. Our challenge is to find the right balance to answer all those needs at the same time. Over the next three to four years, we will be able to provide the customer with a very different experience from what we have now today – and the challenge is to tackle this over the next 18-24 months.

¿Están utilizando más la IA y el análisis predictivo en la experiencia del cliente?

En la actualidad, nuestro uso de la IA y los datos really focuses on customer purchasing habits – what they have purchased during the past three or four rentals, so that we can propose the right product when they come to rent their next vehicle or send them offers in future. It’s about creating a relationship with the customer.

But I think the future will bring new interactions based on using data, particularly in relation to connected cars and being able to assist the customer during their rental experience. For example, they may tend to listen to a certain radio station when they’re driving, and with a connected car, they could perhaps find the radio automatically tuned to that station when they get in the car. 

Con un “coche conectado” es posible realizar muchas cosas de ese estilo, por lo que trabajaremos con los fabricantes de automóviles para utilizar esa conectividad y los datos de cara a ofrecer nuevas experiencias a los conductores. 

Datos, inteligencia artificial , coches conectados, vehículos más limpios, nuevos patrones de propiedad de los coches... Nos ha mencionado tantas tendencias aquí que, ¿significa esto que el cambio está ocurriendo a más velocidad que nunca?

Muchas de estas cuestiones ya las conocíamos, las esperábamos y nos preparábamos para ellas desde hace unos años. La cuestión es que ahora tienen que hacerse realidad. 

The speed of delivering change has certainly been a major topic during the Covid-19 pandemic. On the one hand, it has accelerated some consumer behavior changes, such as the switch to digital. On the other hand, Covid-19 has impacted businesses’ ability to deliver things. For example, in the vehicle rental sector, with customers anxious to avoid any contact with the virus, sanitization has been a top priority for us. We changed our processes, we had them certified by an independent company and so on, to protect and reassure our employees and customers. Because that has been our top priority throughout, it has perhaps slowed down the speed of some other aspects of change – the switch to lower-emissions travel, for example. 

Pero, para responder a esta pregunta de forma más general y menos centrada en la casuística Covid, el cambio, realmente, es una historia que continuamente se repite en el sector de la movilidad. Siempre hay nuevas empresas que intentan perturbar nuestro mercado, lo que nos obliga a replantearnos, cada vez, el modelo y el futuro. En la experiencia del cliente, el cambio es una constante y siempre estamos trabajando en ello.

Muchas gracias, Christophe, por tu visión experta sobre la Nueva Normalidad. No cabe duda de que hay lecciones valiosas, tanto para el sector de la movilidad como para otros sectores, y te lo agradecemos. Estamos deseando ver cómo evolucionan estas tendencias en los próximos años, incluyendo el hecho de no tener que volver a sintonizar la emisora de radio en nuestro “coche conectado” de alquiler o compartido.

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