Fox Rent a Car Gets Their Reservations Booming Through LiveChat

The challenge

A channel dedicated to online customers

One of the best ways to expand your business is the exploration of untapped communication channels. You’re almost guaranteed a return on your investment by improving the number of ways potential clients can reach your product or service.

Jacob Kopiczak, marketing manager at Fox Rent A Car, a US-based car rental company, is a perfect example. He understands these unused communications channels and, in return, implements them as aspects of his business. Kopiczak shared his first-hand knowledge of the topic:

We wanted to give our customers another method of communicating with our reservation agents. The majority of our business comes from our website. We hoped that providing a dedicated channel to our online consumers would improve their experience on www.foxrentacar.com.

Jacob Kopiczak, Marketing Manager at Fox Rent A Car

The solution

Message sneak peek and canned responses put agents on the fast track

To try and simplify the car rental process, Kopiczak and his team identified live chat as a solution for the car reservation process. They planned to improve customers’ access to their services through online interactions with reservation agents. Those interactions were the ultimate goal alongside enhancing their customers’ experience by making assistance readily available.

While these types of improvements are beneficial for business, the list of pros goes on. By providing a chat option on their site, Fox Rent A Car opened a new communication channel revealing tons of new leads. The company’s chat went live in February 2012 with a team of five agents that quickly expanded to ten.

Currently, 36 reservation agents are handling the stations, with nearly all of them having access to live chat throughout the day. This offers a different type of communication compared to traditional methods like phone and email. However, a phone call is still an option when a customer wants to clarify the details.

Although Kopiczak didn’t know what to expect at first, the response from customers indicates that installing LiveChat was a success:

LiveChat was new to our customers, and we did not know what to expect. The customers had no problems with it — they started pouring in from day one. LiveChat is a hit.

Jacob Kopiczak, Marketing Manager at Fox Rent A Car

To deal with such a high volume of customers, operators need tools that’ll help them handle multiple clients simultaneously. LiveChat is just that. Message sneak peek, one of LiveChat’s features, allows agents to see what the client is typing in real time so that they can start writing their answers in advance. The agents also use canned responses that allow them to answer common questions by choosing one of the pre-made responses.

The result

Car reservations go through the roof

With as many as 800 chats daily, LiveChat seems to be an alternative and convenient channel to make a reservation. Sometimes, the agents have as many as 25 chats about reservations at the same time. Kopiczak concluded that with LiveChat, they found a platform they could integrate into their website with specific administrative controls needed to manage their business. They didn’t find that with other providers.

Kuba Rogalski

LiveChat