How Turo Found the Right Route to Customer Happiness with Airkit

When you look under the hood of the car sharing industry, you find a million moving parts. A network of finely tuned infrastructure connects folks who have a car and might not be using it at the moment to individuals who don’t have a car and would love to rent one. 

For Turo, a leading peer-to-peer car sharing network with over 10 million users across the US, Canada, and the UK, there’s an art to ensuring that all those moving parts interlock and work together seamlessly. 

With millions of users and over 450,000 vehicles available for rent, Turo concentrates on tailoring its operations to serve customers seamlessly. That could mean designing the UX of their app to make it easy for a guest to extend their reservation time or making it simple for a host to approve that reservation extension. The core of their focus is building well-crafted systems to meet and exceed customer expectations at scale. 

In 2020, Turo discovered an aspect of their operations that wasn’t operating as efficiently as they intended. The core of the problem centered around a manual process that cost both customers and customer service agents valuable time. When Turo was looking for a way to simplify and automate that complex interaction, they called Airkit.

Using intelligent automation and well-crafted self-service flows powered by Airkit’s low-code, SaaS platform, Turo saved their support agents, guests, and hosts tremendous amounts of time while boosting their CSAT scores. Let’s peek under the hood to see how they accomplished that. 

Driving a Better Customer Experience

On the road, there are all sorts of variables that could cause a guest to be late when returning a car to a host. It could be a traffic jam, a wrong turn, or a quick snack pit stop. If a guest happens to be running over 30 minutes late, a host can issue an additional usage charge to be compensated for the extra time the guest spent with their car. 

Prior to adopting Airkit, that process required a call to Turo’s customer service line. If the host happened to be issuing that fee on a high-traffic return day, they would have to wait on hold before finding out if they were eligible to receive that additional usage fee.  

For Turo, the prospect of a customer waiting on hold just to be told they were ineligible for the very thing they were calling about seemed like a less than ideal customer experience. Even if the host was eligible for the fee, they would still have to spend time providing information like their phone number, email, reservation ID, and more. 

That’s where Airkit came in. 

The Impact of Airkit

Airkit enables companies to build self-service experiences and powerful automation flows, all without rallying a team of engineers or waiting on the next engineering sprint. Using Airkit, Turo was able to bridge the gap between their customers and their customer support agents, building a faster and more enjoyable experience for their users. 

When hosts would call into Turo’s customer support line to request an additional usage fee, or a late return fee in the event a guest hadn’t returned their car more than 24 hours past its return time, a customer service agent on the other end of the line would have to type all of that host’s relevant information in a note on Zendesk attached to a support ticket. This manual process slowed down Turo’s response time and cost Turo’s customers time as well.

Using Automation to Boost CSAT

Using Airkit, that critical information is now captured in a few moments. These days, when a host calls in regarding an additional usage fee, all they have to do is press a button, and Turo sends them a link to a web-based self-service flow.

There, the host can accomplish nearly everything they used to wait on hold to do. They’re able to clearly see the guidelines they have to meet before issuing a fee, such as guest notification. They’re also able to enter in vital information that Turo’s customer support needs in order to process their request, such as their name, phone number, the time the car was returned, and their reservation number. 

When the host submits that information as part of Turo’s Airkit-powered flow, Airkit sends that data directly to Turo’s Zendesk instance, automatically populating customer details into a Zendesk ticket.

Now, the onus isn’t on the customers to provide the context a support agent needs in order to understand and fulfill a customer request. Airkit delivers the information that agents need to provide a more tailored, efficient customer experience. 

With this new self-service flow, Turo increased their CSAT for late return requests by 13% and their additional usage fee by 11%, all while cutting down the time it takes for customers to complete both processes. Using Airkit, Turo found not only the right route to customer happiness but a faster one at that. 

Read about Turo’s results in greater detail in the customer case study here.