In the service industry, pleasing a customer can be tough.  Providing a wide range of choice in the services offered has been a tried and tested strategy to woo customers. But how do you appease an impatient customer?

When sales executives at Carzonrent, one of India’s topmost car renting companies, sat with their clients to provide them a car leasing plan tailored to their needs, they often took upto half a day to submit a proposal. Client preferences with regard to the specifcs of the cars to be leased required the sales team to feed the data into a program that processed the data and came out with a result.  Half a day is enough for a car to roll hundreds of miles or a customer to turn sullen.

The IT team at Carzonrent developed a Fleet Management System (FMS) solution to get past such delays in processing customer requirements. The in-house developed Leasesoft, is an end-to-end solution to the car leasing business of Carzonrent, that not only given its customers the fexibility to instantly choose from a wide spectrum of available vehicles, but also provides a host of leasing options. The FMS has helped in reducing the turnaround time to a customer query by 90 percent and all operations of the company have now been centralised.  

Clearing the roadblocks
There were two reason for developing a FMS in Carzonrent Firstly, the leasing business of Carzonrent is expanding rapidly. Using the manual processes caused a lot of wastage of time and thus a webbased system, which could be used across the country and which could be accessible from remote locations, was the need of the hour.

Accessing information regarding different permutations and combinations of available cars is critical to the sales deparment. In the absence of a comprehensive and automated tool for generating multiple options for the clients, the pace of business was sluggish. The sales team could only revert to the client/s after manually checking the inventories and creating suitable options.

Secondly, without such a system, monitoring the maintenance of cars and checking the servicing obligations was a nightmare. “The nature of the business demands that we keep a constant check on the condition of the vehicles to avoid drastic depreciation of the asset. It was also very important to keep the cost of the infrastructure bare minimum,” says Rajesh Munjal, Head IT, Carzonrent.

Before designing the FMS, Carzonrent was using a FoxPro-based manual system. It worked on Windows platform and client-server architecture. The system, however, could not be accessed from remote/feld locations and didn’t allow for consolidation of information. All factors related to vehicle leasing had to be manually fed into the system which then came out with feasible options for the clients. The manual collation of information meant that the response to the client was slow. The turnaround time was severely impacted even when there was a minor change in the proposals and offers.

A number of readymade feet management systems were available in the market. “However, none of them were meeting our requirements of generating customer quotations and managing the feet at the same time,” Munjal points out. The solutions available in the market were either addressing the feet management or the leasing aspect. The need to integrate the two functions became even more pronounced in the wake of a recessionary economy and a geographically expanding business.

Passing the bend
A 12-member team, with Munjal at the helm, took on the challenge of designing an integrated solution which could be a one-stop-shop for all the departments in the business — from sales to operations to fnance. The core team worked for six months to develop and test Lease Soft, now a proprietary solution of Carzonrent.

The process began with identifying the key business challenges including quote generation, service reminders, availability of services, etc. “It was important that the team had a good overview of the business and understood the exigencies involved. Building a solution for a business like ours was not so easy,” says Munjal.

With the requirements drawn out, the software development team started work. The solution was built using a Microsoft .Net platform. “The initial coding phase took a lot of time as there were a lot of bugs to be fixed.”    

“The application is far more stable now. It is running without any problems in all the 68 cities where he have operations. All client acquisition and servicing transactions, feet management, dealer management etc. are taken care of by Lease Soft,” says Munjal.

The devlopment required an investment of Rs. 28 lakhs, which Munjal estimated would be recovered over a period of two years. “The implementation has been so successful that we were able to recover the costs in just six months from its deployment,” he claims.

Enjoying the drive
Karunesh Arya, COO, Carzonrent is extremely satisfed with the FMS. Arya says that there were many requirements in connection with the commercial vehicles — maintaining the logs regarding the ftness check, getting the road permits, processing the service statements, updating the billing status etc. “Lease Soft not only gives this information in real time, it also helps in effective utilisation of information by all departments. It is user-friendly from all aspects and has considerably reduced the complexities associated with the feet management business,” says Arya.

Another major beneft of the system is the ease with which a small, core operations team can use it effciently. It is now possible for just eight people, based in major cities, to carry out operations spread in 68 cities. “The availability of data related to revenue and expenses makes the cost versus spending analysis simple. The constant comparison keeps the costs low and makes it less challenging to take corrective actions,” says Munjal.

In future, Munjal has plans of extending some capabilities of the software so that regular customers of the company can generate quotations on their own. “This will not only reduce the manpower required, but the ease and transparency of the process will also go a long way in winning customer confdence,” he says.

sana.khan@9dot9.in