Penske Truck Leasing is a Penske Transportation Solutions company headquartered in Reading, Pennsylvania operating more than 327,000 vehicles and serving customers from nearly 1,300 locations. Its product lines include full-service truck leasing, contract maintenance, commercial and consumer truck rentals, used truck sales, transportation and warehousing management and supply chain management solutions.

The challenge

In the wake of COVID-19, Penske witnessed unpredictable demand spikes in truck reservations, which continued even with the economy opening up. Hiring and training new talent wasn’t easiest in a remote working environment with estimated cost and time doubling against the norm. Penske faced unique set of challenges as lack of trained agents and lower productivity in the remote environment meant customers were on hold for longer periods and once connected overwhelmed agents took more than 5 minutes to book or update a reservation. Penske sought to simplify the reservation process allowing customers to quickly access and book a vehicle while bringing in efficiencies in its call center operations.

The solution

To automate and streamline the truck rental reservation process, Penske Truck Rental deployed Avaamo’s Contact Center AI assistant, “Erica” that onboards new customers and enables existing Penske customers to confirm or modify their rental reservations through voice calls. To provide personalized, speedy resolution for any query related to existing reservations, the conversational AI-based solution identifies the caller by their phone number to anticipate their request and proactively addresses their issues as well as maintain context for each customer based on their histories to avoid repetitive questions/inputs.

The pre-trained model from Avaamo delivered 80% accuracy out-of-box. Within a span of 8 weeks, the Avaamo trained model was running at 100% accuracy. Beyond the ability to answer questions, Penske worked closely with Avaamo to ensure Contact Center AI assistant was tailored to Penske’s culture and value and learnt nuances about the customers to deliver a true advisor experience during reservations.

Once Penske rolled out the Avaamo Contact Center AI on a geographical basis, starting from Eastern states gradually moving towards the Western states, until all Penske customers had access to it.

The results

Since its implementation, the Contact Center AI assistant reduced resolution time dramatically and ensured zero waiting period for incoming calls. With faster and easier reservation process and personalized service, customer satisfaction has improved for Penske. “We are impressed by the simplified phone experience the conversational AI system delivers for our rental customers” said Mike Krut, Senior Vice President of Information Technology at Penske Truck Leasing, “We are also seeing positive improvements related to the call center’s overall performance”.

Bottom line, Avaamo Contact Center AI has already paid for itself several times over and now Penske is identifying other use-cases to expand into other areas in the organization.