Background
Penske’s story and new challenges
With more than 327,000 vehicles for commercial and consumer rental and over 2,500 rental locations, Penske is one of the most recognizable and trusted transportation businesses on the road today.Penske’s bright yellow consumer moving truck rentals are a significant portion of its business and an important element of its brand. With approximately 200 associates, the central reservations contact center for Penske consumer rentals takes both inbound phone calls and follows up with outbound calls on inquiries that come in via the company website.
Problem
Low answer rates were impacting the bottom line
To further optimize operations and increase their answer rates, Emerson Jacobelli, Director of the Consumer Contact Center at Penske, experimented with various recordings as part of Penske’s outreach, changing the automated voice, tailoring messaging and doing A/B testing between live and recorded calls.The contact center associates were also reorganized into regional teams to be more targeted in different areas. Despite various tactics, none were having the desired impact on customer answer rates.
Solution
Optimizing outreach with Hiya Connect
Penske then turned to Hiya to bring identity to the voice call so that potential customers could know and trust who was calling and increase the likelihood of answering the phone. Only by influencing that last mile after a call is placed would Penske know with confidence that they were doing everything to optimize their outreach. With Hiya, they knew they could positively impact their ability to engage with prospects at the critical time when a customer is most interested in renting a vehicle.
Increasing sales conversion with Hiya
After implementing Hiya and bringing trust and identity back to the voice call, the results were astounding. At the end of 2019, Penske’s contact center was experiencing answer rates ranging from 14-17%. With Hiya, answer rates jumped to 26-33%, amounting to more than a 100% increase! With this doubling in answer rate along with 46.7% more calls answered on the first attempt, Penske has been able to reach more prospects faster and seen a considerable decrease in the time to convert these leads.The likelihood that the contact center would receive a call back after leaving a message had also been a major challenge according to Jacobelli. “In 2019, we struggled to see these numbers. With the addition of Hiya, we’re now seeing a strong return in our call back percentages.”
Unleashing a more powerful call center with Hiya
There are numerous tactics one can take to influence call center metrics and that all important answer rate, but without identity and trust in the call, it won’t be picked up. Hiya provides call recipients insights into who is calling so that the chances of branded calling are so significantly increased that they offset other negative external effects to your business, like a pandemic, that one has no way of controlling.According to Jacobelli, “Hiya wasn’t on our list in late 2019 or early 2020, but this project took precedent over anything else and it has made all the difference.”
