Costco is a wholesale membership retailer dedicated to providing the best prices on quality goods. Founded in 1976, originally only serving small business, Costco is now a multi-billion dollar currently operating in eight countries.
The Hertz Corporation operates the Hertz, Dollar and Thrifty car rental brands in approximately 9,700 corporate and franchisee locations throughout North America, Europe, The Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. The Hertz Corporation is one of the largest worldwide airport general use vehicle rental companies, and the Hertz brand is one of the most recognized in the world.
Hertz’s 1-800 customer service only operated Monday-Friday, and did not answer questions received over social media. This meant that weekend travelers could not reach any form of live customer service. This was extremely surprising and upsetting for many Hertz Rental Car customers who expected the global travel mega-company to have customer service available in their time of distress.
Nuvi developed a real-time outreach strategy built around keywords, personalized responses, and coupon sharing. As well, a social customer care solution was implemented to reverse negative sentiment. Costco used Nuvi Engage to intercept mentions with keywords relevant to the offer along with Nuvi Plan and Publish to collaborate and send personalized communications to potential customers. Nuvi Analyze allowed Costco to understand the effectiveness of the targeted content.
Hertz has a system of about 40 customer service codes that they use across 1-800 number support and through Nuvi Engage, allowing them to tag each social media customer service interaction with the corresponding topic.
For example, Hertz created codes within Nuvi Engage to use when a customer has a negative employee interaction, complains about a dirty car, asks about lost and found, and complains about a Hertz location being unable to honor the class of car that was reserved. They created 40 codes in all to cover the most common customer service inquiries.
Nuvi Engage allowed Hertz to report the types of experiences customers were having and communicate those insights to the rest of the organization, so they could focus on making the most impactful improvements to the customers experience.
Once the solutions were implemented, experiences like this started to happen. Comedian Sarah Colonna’s negative experience at the Hertz counter. Sarah tweeted about how there were no available rentals when she arrived to pick up her car in Atlanta.
Hertz real-time engagement team was able to reverse a negative into a positive and ultimately turn Sarah into a brand ambassador. Stories like these and the truth in the data makes our work worth every tweet!
Once the solutions were implemented, experiences like this started to happen. Comedian Sarah Colonna’s negative experience at the Hertz counter. Sarah tweeted about how there were no available rentals when she arrived to pick up her car in Atlanta. Hertz real-time engagement team was able to reverse a negative into a positive and ultimately turn Sarah into a brand ambassador. Stories like these and the truth in the data makes our work worth every tweet!Another example is rather pertinent to what is happening today. During the crisis of Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Twitter proved to be the best means of communication for disaster relief. The Hertz Corporation was able to assist customers effectively by bringing in the fleet to help responders and victims with transport needs. Hertz also used the Nuvi platform to connect with influencers who were traveling to Houston for relief efforts.
Influencer Stef Michaels, known to her millions of social followers as @adventuregirl, noticed that Hertz was actively using Twitter to engage with citizens. Stef was heading to Houston with over 1,000 dog food bags for displaced animals. She tweeted @hertz to partner on this important journey.
Hertz provided Stef with a SUV to transport the food to shelters leading to increased engagement, reach and positive sentiment.
In just 8 weeks, Nuvi was able to help bridge the gap between Costco and their customers in the following ways:
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