Hertz

Client Story: Hertz
Good Growth - Hertz

The Challenge

Enabling a global enterprise to take a new approach to transformation: customer-centric, iterative, risk-mitigated, and self-funding.

This is the story of how Good Growth partnered with Hertz over multiple years to transform how the world’s largest car rental business serves and engages with its customers. The familiar story of digital transformation is one of ambitious goals, huge projects and major investment. It is also all too often one of chronic, drastic under-delivery – this is the other side of that story.

During my time as CMO at Hertz International, Good Growth delivered a complex transformation for us far faster and at far lower cost than a traditional approach. We were able to move quickly without taxing our own IT resources or reengineering our existing infrastructure. With Good Growth’s help we were able to tackle some very complex problems that had seemed intractable”

Vincent Gillet Former CMO of Hertz International

The Approach

Hertz had a long-term plan for digital transformation to deliver efficiencies and improve customer experience. The overall project cost was projected to be in the mid hundreds of millions.

The ambitious timeline was between two and three years.

Hertz had hired a leading global consultancy to overhaul its online customer experience, but after three years, all that had been produced was a design.

Hertz gave Good Growth this design and, six weeks later, it was live in production on Hertz’s UK website.

 

Hertz later engaged another leading global consultancy on the digital transformation project to deliver the online customer experience globally, but again all that was delivered was the design.

In another six-week sprint, Good Growth launched this experience and Hertz began split testing this design against the original.

Once the data confirmed a winner, Hertz used Good Growth to roll out the new experience to all users in Europe.

Good Growth delivered the desired re-designed customer journey within 6 weeks.

The Results for Hertz

  • Less time – Good Growth’s approach accelerated digital transformation and took months off the proposed roadmap
  • Less cost – Unlocked millions in cost savings against larger vendors
  • Less risk – A 13% increase in online revenue in 18 months

Crisis Response

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hertz opted to pause aspects of their Digital Transformation in the UK, but they moved swiftly with Good Growth to roll out new experiences to Australia, New Zealand, and to franchise operators across the globe.

With Good Growth’s collaboration, Hertz have tested or rolled out more than 25 new customer experience initiatives including: keyless mobile access car rental, market- specific regulatory compliance, better location-finding with the Google Maps API, new insurance products and loyalty programme incentives.

Before state:

  • Customer experience transformation was held up behind critical updates to back-end systems.
  • It took a long time to launch new propositions due to slow legacy tech.
  • It was difficult to enact a more iterative approach and generate momentum behind transformation due to the time and cost of innovation.
  • The business was grappling with the risks of large projects that sought to change the enterprise in one huge effort.
  • Innovative ideas were stifled by their risk profile.

With Good Growth:

  • The customer experience has been totally transformed, with Good Growth’s Innovation Platform taking care of the interface with back-end systems.
  • New propositions go live quickly with real customers providing real data that enables fast, confident and robust decision-making.
  • Hertz can take a more efficient approach to transformation: innovation is low-risk, teams within different regions and business units are empowered to try things out, and winning ideas are scaled rapidly across the business.

Pre-Pandemic, the Good Growth Innovation Platform was an independent business – Amigo – which has now been acquired by Good Growth.

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