THE CHALLENGE

A global vehicle rental leader was planning a new flagship service - curbside delivery and collection. Their existing digital applications lacked the capabilities to bring this idea to reality. We came in to design the customer and employee interaction model, and digital experience.

OUR PROCESS

As so often happens, our client was in a race against the clock. They were rolling out a brand new service in four months and had no digital enablement established. Development was starting in weeks. There was no time for proper due diligence, research or comprehensive requirement gathering. We were going to build the plane while flying it... We were up to the challenge!

We quickly started iterating the app experience for the key user groups - customers and field service employees. This helped us iron out the interaction model that we would be needed to support the new service with a premium experience for the customer, and consumer-grade tech for the employees. The field service employee and customer would need to be able to communicate, know where they each were in physical space and along the rental experience journey. Field service employees and managers also needed tools to stay organized, forecast work, and manage queues of tasks. 

The client team were great collaborators and before long we had the interaction model established and were on to edge cases. Meanwhile we were iterating the UI to create a design system that would scale, and adding the top-funnel of the journey to existing owned channels. 

The reservation and purchase flows presented their own challenges, since new processes would need to be established to replace what was traditionally handled during a customer visit to the desk and to enable new models of vehicle reservations based on location and distance to distribution hubs. Technical limitations soon arose which surfaced tough design choices. We worked tirelessly to consume the complexity so that the employees and customers experiences were simple, transparent, and scalable.

OUTCOMES

MVP rolled out in 4 months in North American markets with Europe coming fast on its heals. The new service is now live in 12 airports and city centers across the US. European rollout planned for the coming month.