Sycor.Rental: #TheBest Solution to Challenges Equipment Rental Companies Face
Part 1: Continuous Delivery of Outstanding Customer Service
The equipment rental industry has been a dynamic sector with significant growth over the past decade. While growth rates are projected to soften over the upcoming years, total industry revenue is still expected to moderately increase on an annual basis primarily driven by a structural shift towards rental instead of ownership.
Notwithstanding overall market growth and generally favorable market dynamics, equipment rental businesses face their own set of challenges that can impede progress and cause them to fall short of their operational and financial goals.
In this first-of-three-parts article, we will look at three common challenges in the context of the equipment rental industry characteristics and the current market environment and discuss how equipment rental companies can leverage Sycor.Rental, a rental, workshop, and service software that is fully integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management (F&SCM) capabilities, to overcome these obstacles and facilitate their sustained success.
Equipment rental businesses operate in fragmented and highly competitive environments. To differentiate themselves from competitors in the market and gain a competitive advantage, rental companies heavily invest in product innovation, such as IoT-enabled equipment, acquire highly specialized equipment, leverage their location to cater to specific regional needs, or target underserved niche markets. In addition to the differentiation of their rental fleet, it’s imperative for rental companies to put a strong emphasis on customer service differentiation to further augment their product offering and set themselves apart.
Providing excellent customer service is critical when it comes to retaining key accounts, increasing customer lifetime value, attracting referrals, and in consequence, building a strong brand. While certain customer service offerings are inherently labor-dependent and physical customer touchpoints are and will remain important, outstanding customer service cannot purely be a function of staff availability, particularly in times of a tight labor market. Instead, rental companies increasingly need to leverage technology to add new digital customer touchpoints and diversify their current customer service portfolio. Multi-channel communication and collaboration tools, self-service capabilities, and automated responses for routine inquiries, to name a few, will need to play a greater role in complementing more traditional customer service offerings. The key to adoption and customer-perceived value of technology in this context is that the deployed solutions increase flexibility, promote transparency, offer ease of access to relevant information, and facilitate customer autonomy.
With Sycor.Rental’s customer portal, equipment rental companies can add a key component to their customer service offering that is able to meet current customer service digitalization needs. The customer portal is a collaboration tool that allows customers to self-sufficiently manage all their rental contracts, wherever they are and whenever they need to. Aside from the ability to track delivery notes and invoice lines related to their rented equipment, customers can view open balances, shorten, or extend rental terms, call equipment off rent, or report damage, defects, and faults along with photo documentation. The addition of self-service features to existing collaboration channels supports the empowerment of customers, offers convenience of access to all relevant information at any given point in time, and provides customers with more insight and control over their rented equipment. While this will not only optimize the customer journey and lead to greater customer satisfaction, the resources, time, and effort rental companies need to invest to deliver routine information to their customers can significantly be reduced. The freed-up resources can then be used for higher value customer service matters that require personal attention, such as expert guidance and advice or the resolution of complaints.
In short, Sycor.Rental’s customer portal supports equipment rental companies in their initiative to extend their customer service portfolio and allows them to enhance their customer service differentiation strategy, even in times of a tight labor market.
- Merlin Witt, Functional Consultant, Sycor Americas
Part 2 and Part 3 of this article will be posted next.
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