Rentalcars.com’s Alan Murray Helps Steer The Digital Transformation Course

The deputy marketing director at the U.K.-based online car hire business acknowledges the road to success is via exceeding customers’ expectations, but those expectations are constantly growing.

Companies born digital may have the edge when it comes to performance marketing, but they still face multiple marketing challenges in a world where business transformation, regardless of roots, is now a necessity. For U.K.-based Rentalcars.com, this has prompted a recent reshuffle and a new focus on customer experience beyond value-for-money car hire.

Alan Murray joined Rentalcars.com just over two years ago, recently becoming deputy marketing director. CMO.com caught up with him and began by asking about his role and structural changes.

Murray: Since February last year, I’ve been working with our CMO, Dan Robb, on a reshuffle for the marketing team. I call it that, rather than a reorganisation, because it’s not complete. We haven’t thrown out the legacy of the business, but we’re trying to increase the emphasis on the things we’re yet to become world class at.

The business was designed on a philosophy of best prices and best in-class customer service, and was built through exceptional performance-based marketing. Our expertise in channels such as PPC, email, and SEO has provided the backbone of our growth. However, there are still relatively untapped opportunities for us, such as building a stronger brand presence in the offline world and proactively managing our online and offline brand reputation—these are areas where we historically haven’t spent much time but intend to focus more on in the future.

At the same time, the business is working on a new structure for product development that will help us take customer experience and service to the next level. We’ve always run a lot of experiments on the website to improve our seamless experience, enabling more consumers to complete the path to purchase. With the new product structure, we’re trying to keep what’s been successful there—strong conversion improvements every year—while also looking after the customer a bit more and making sure they have all the information they need to make more informed choices and get the car that’s best for them. The hope is that if we do a better job of helping the customer to choose the product that’s best for them and to know what to expect at the desk, then they’ll reward us with greater loyalty.

CMO.com: You’ve built up a large profitable business with 8 million car rentals a year. What’s driving the need to change?

Murray: In pure play digital, you can scale extremely quickly. In the past, if you had a shop, every time you wanted to broaden your reach and add a new shop, you’d have to make a big investment that you’d have to pay off before you could add another one. In digital, we can find customers in entire new countries quite quickly. You get the payback straight away, and there’s no capital investment. Fast growth isn’t guaranteed, but it’s significantly easier than it used to be for new businesses.

But now we’ve been growing quickly for 10 years, and we can’t assume that there’s a never-ending stream of “easy” growth there. We’ve got to work harder to do an even better job of looking after and retaining the customers that we’ve acquired. To differentiate yourself in the long term, the service offering should exceed the customer’s expectations, and, with new technologies, those expectations are growing.

Today, the car hire business is an industry where things can easily go wrong, and where things can easily be miscommunicated between sales, supply, and the customer. It’s quite a complicated purchase for customers, so it’s easy for important details to be missed if you don’t have excellent, tailored communication and world-class customer service. We’ve built up an excellent global customer service centre in Manchester that’s open 24/7 and services over 40 languages, which gives us a key structural advantage over our competitors in terms of resolving issues.

The customer needs our support to help navigate the experience end to end, and the marketing team is concentrating on working closer with the customer service team, to ensure we are setting the right expectations and making the right promises so that we can avert issues in the first place. We want to make sure the customer is always fully informed about everything they need prior to travelling, and the relationship between the two teams is fuelling the knowledge to drive these constant improvements.

CMO.com: What does marketing innovation look like for you?

Murray: The majority of our innovation, by both volume and benefit, is small, incremental improvements being made every day in each of our teams that add up to massive differences in the way each channel is run over the course of each year.

That said, we also have a couple of more centrally co-ordinated innovation efforts at any given point. One right now is attribution. Like many online retailers, we’re mostly last-click driven today, but we need to understand which marketing channels are most effective in delivering customers to a conversion and the lifetime value of the customers who we acquire. I’d say we’re two-thirds of the way through that project and getting close to starting to deliver. That’s going to make a big difference in the way that we manage our spend in 2017.

The other is personalisation, which comes back to customer experience. We’re most of the way through building our own personalisation platform. That takes all of the information that we have about customer in real time, helps to identify a customer when they turn up onsite, and looks at what recommendations in terms of experiences to deliver for this customer. It’s going to allow us to make improvements to customer experience for those customers who may have different requirements to normal, for example being able to provide information about child seat laws in different countries to families travelling with children so they’re not surprised on arrival.

CMO.com: What are the plans for extending the customer experience beyond the booking and into the offline world?

Murray: In the short term, offline is about offline platform marketing. We had our first awareness-building advertising campaign last year in the U.K. and Australia. So far the campaigns have centred on TV, with support from out of home, radio, and some print.

The Rentalcars.com app is a big part of our vision, both in terms of marketing conversion, but also as an intimate companion for customers and keeping us relevant throughout the trip and post-trip. It’s key in allowing us to manage customers experience a little bit more tightly to ensure the customer has a good end-to-end experience.

There’s a lot we can start to do, such as delivering reminders 24 hours before you’re supposed to pick up your car on remembering your driving licence and two forms of ID. For customers who we know are travelling as a family, we could deliver a game if it looks like there’s going to be a long queue at the desk. But our assets are only digital, so we have to deliver them in that world for the time being.