Car Rental Contact Centre: Email Triage and One-Click Agent Assist

The client ranks among the largest car rental groups in Europe. It is a multi-billion-euro business, and its contact centre runs on Salesforce across several offices.

Calls and emails came in with the same small set of requests: extend the rental, cancel it, send roadside assistance, swap the vehicle, or change where it is returned. For each one an agent had to step through several Salesforce screens and status changes by hand. Emails added a step before that: a person read every message only to decide which of the five requests it contained, and only then could the work begin.

Where the cost showed up

• Longer calls. Each additional screen adds time to the current call and to every call queued behind it.
• Longer queues. While an agent is navigating Salesforce, the next customer waits.
• Manual email sorting. Each message had to be read and sorted by a person before any action was taken.
• Records left half-done. Status changes spread over many screens, made while a customer is on the line, are exactly where records get only partly updated.
• Revenue lost. When an interaction is slow or dropped, a rental goes unextended or a booking stays unchanged, and that money is gone.

Instead of paging through screen after screen, agents click once, and the most frequent email requests get sorted and processed without a person reading them first.

• Calls got shorter. What used to take several screens now takes one click, and call durations fell.
• Each agent handles more transactions, and productivity rose in every one of the client's offices.
• High-confidence emails for the five request types were sorted and processed with no manual reading.
• Revenue went up. The client reported higher revenue. This comes from the delivery team's recollection and is not a documented figure.
• A direction, not a measurement. The engagement did not record volumes or timings, so the numbers on this page describe scope rather than savings.

What to watch

Salesforce puts out three major releases every year, and any of them can shift the screens a UI robot relies on. A one-click button that breaks in the middle of a call does more harm than having no button. Wherever Salesforce exposes an action through the API, we used it, which keeps most of the work safe from screen changes. The steps automated through the UI are the ones to retest around every release.

For a simpler version of this build, see refund processing for in-flight wifi at a UK airline group. There the mailbox had a single purpose, so no intent classification was needed.