CIO interview: Neal Sunners, Avis Budget Group

How Avis is using digital to lower 'peak stress' for customers

In the face of digital disruption to the travel industry, the car rental market has remained disappointingly static. You collect and pay for your car, you drive it and later return it - hoping that you haven't picked up any new dents on the way.

Those bookends of interaction with the rental company are where customers experience peak stress, says Neal Sunners of rental giant Avis. As senior vice president for innovation and emerging technologies, he is in charge of finding new ways to use digital in the rental journey, with the result that Avis customers can now both collect and return a car without talking to anyone.

We looked at these peaks of stress and determined areas where we should use digital as a means of stress reduction

"There have been many driving forces that have served as a catalyst for innovation in the mobility services industry: the Uber or Lyft effect… the move to the sharing economy and the impact of millenials - and then there's connected cities and connected homes… All of these serve as drivers for innovation that Avis has determined our response to, which fuels and drives our strategies," Sunners said.

‘The Uber effect' - transport without having to interact with another person - prompted Avis to develop its first mobile offering, Pronto, in 2016: a tablet app that Avis staff could use to process customers, without them having to queue at a counter.

"As we deployed the tablet [app], we saw a reduction in the stress. That was an early pilot of what became our digital transformation. It wasn't driven solely by Uber, it was a known issue that we had; but the urgency of smoothing out these stress peaks was exacerbated when we started to consider the general disruption of the industry."

Avis relied on its partner, Mindtree, to help build Pronto and bring the executive team on board, using what Sunners calls "a pretty slick working prototype." The success of the app then fuelled the development of another product called MDMS, or Management and Damage Maintenance System.

As Pronto assists with the collection process, MDMS is there to speed up returns. It acts as a digital record of the car, with photographs and customer signatures acknowledging any new damage. Sunners says that its implementation has reduced disputes, as well as customer pain and stress.

"The whole [digital transformation] process has been aimed at the big pain points… Customers now, within 20 minutes of their plane landing at the airport, receive a text message with a link to the app, and it gives them a selection of vehicles to take for this rental. They can exchange, they can upgrade, they can add products - they can do all of that on the smartphone app. When they get to the rental place, they simply get in their chosen car and drive it off. They don't have to see anybody or talk to anybody… It's all about removing friction."

Sunners sums up the benefits of the company's transformation with the following mantra: "Happy colleagues, happy customers; happy customers, return business; return business, increased revenues; increased revenues, happy shareholders."

Bringing together old and new

The core of Avis' backend IT is its legacy mainframe, but over time the company has added "lots" of components outside it, including the new fleet management and fleet optimisation systems. Sunners explains that the company needed a way to integrate all of these into a platform that was accessible by partners and by colleagues.

"Earlier this year we started the project that is known internally as Tempest, to essentially build a mobility services platform for Avis Budget Group. Its first customer base are our own products, but it's been written in a way so that we can now offer services to partners via that platform; services that today they cannot easily acquire."

Mindtree acted as the development partner on Tempest, which is an API platform, to take Avis from "a somewhat closed legacy architecture approach of the past, to a platform-based organisation where anything could be developed and designed to be exposed as an API for our partners to use… I call it ‘Our gateway to mobility'."

CIO interview: Neal Sunners, Avis Budget Group

How Avis is using digital to lower 'peak stress' for customers

Sunners also told us that Avis had used Mindtree to help with its data centre consolidation, taking its data sites from 14 to just two, "pretty much on an as-is basis."

"Managing all of the distributed data centres, with their different environments, and doing it with suppliers, was hugely inefficient, and so merging them all into a central location, managed by a single team, has allowed us to do a number things: it's allowed us to rationalise our supplier [and] it's allowed us to rationalise our applications; when we started we had something in the realm of 700 applications in our catalogue."

Avis and Mindtree went through that catalogue and categorised apps as enterprise, for those used in every country, and non-enterprise, for those used in only a single location. The latter apps are now curated by Mindtree on a break-fix contract, while Avis spends its own resources on developing the enterprise solutions; the aim is to have all locations using the same app to take the same action.

"When I last checked, the number of non-enterprise [apps] had dropped to about three hundred, so we're seeing significant savings there," said Sunners.

App development was moved to the Avis UK HQ in Bracknell at the same time as the data centre consolidation, which meant that the company moved away from using contractors: at one point it had about 40 distributed IT teams, based around local contractors, many of whom were established freelancers. That presented a problem, though:

"In some cases those contractors [had] been around for an awful long time; there were all sorts of concerns about intellectual property residing with people that didn't actually work for the company. They'd been around for so long that in many ways they could be considered employees, but that wouldn't have been so financially attractive."

At the time of the move, Avis changed its internal IT structure and entered into a master service agreement with Mindtree in Europe, as it was already doing in North America. "They quickly became - by revenue - our largest IT partner in international markets," Sunners noted.

The future

Looking ahead, Avis is putting a significant focus on connected cars. About 10 per cent of its current fleet is defined as ‘connected', and the aim is to hit 100 per cent of the corporate fleet by 2020.

Then there are autonomous ("We're at the bleeding edge," says Sunners) and electric cars ("We're deploying 300 electric vehicles into our Zipcar fleet in London this summer"), as well as the company's plans for connected cities.

"We have our connected city trials in Kansas, where we have, in one geographical location, 5,000 vehicles in a fleet that are all 100 per cent connected, and we're learning lots of operational efficiency gains from having that data at our fingertips. We're learning lots about fleet movement, about customers; we're working hand-in-hand with Kansas, which is an enlightened connected city. We're working out how to fit into the overall mobility landscape…

"Our ecosystem is much more than the vehicles...and we are truly looking at mobility services, way beyond what we provide today, and we've built a very comprehensive view and strategy of how we win there. We're not seeing the same from what we would consider to be our traditional competitors. We have demonstrated to many...how we see our future role, and how we're going to achieve it."