How Enterprise Used dscout to Optimize Their Hybrid Rental Process
An experience insights team leveraged dscout's mobile app to conduct in-the-wild product research to ensure a frictionless experience across their hybrid product suite.
Enterprise's Experience Research team knew that their customers' experiences around mobility rental were shifting and that they needed to adapt. Using dscout, they created a series of holistic journey maps to capture both the perceptions and experiences of customers across a hybrid touchpoint process. dscout's rich, actionable data helped them create a more personalized, user-controllable, and frictionless environment. Here's how...
The Opportunity
The Enterprise team was interested in sourcing friction points with their digital app and broader renting program. Specifically, they wanted to create a smooth, more anticipatory experience for customers, offering them more control, flexibility, and comfort. In particular, the team wanted to investigate differences between physical and digital process variations.
"We wanted to assess whether or not there were variations that existed between the digital and physical experience that would prevent customers from completing the car rental process. This was really, really key for us in having scouts who were able to engage with the Enterprise app from a digital perspective..."
"We also wanted to determine whether customers had a perceived outcome versus their actual outcome and whether that exceeded their expectations about this new concept. We really wanted to understand, are we delivering on the value proposition?"
Enterprise Holdings
The Approach
Using dscout's Diary and Recruit tools, the team recruited Enterprise customers who were taking trips that included a rental product across six locations. They captured micro-moments along each stage of the rental journey, from checking in and finishing paperwork to selecting a vehicle and returning it. The team created questions focused not only on usability metrics, but also attitudinal ones to create a more holistic picture.
The team used the messaging feature to ask probing and follow-up questions, digging into specific areas of opportunity or asking for clarification. In all, they collected over 400 unique journey moments over three weeks. To date, the team has invited over 2,000 Enterprise customers to take part in studies like this, creating a flexible, ongoing research practice.
"We were able to understand what those explicit needs were and what the processes were that customers were going through. Our data inputs gathered helped us to inform whether or not this intervention removed friction, did it work? Did it do what it said it was going to do?"
"And the diary method helped us narrow down on what worked and what didn't work well within those digital and physical experiences and also help us understand whether or not that value proposition pulled through."
Enterprise
The Impact
Given Enterprise's national reach, they wanted a sample that matched. dscout's Recruit tool offered them the ability to sample customers near six different airport locations, which increased the team's confidence in their findings and recommendations to product teams.
"If you think about the scalability of research and your small but mighty team of researchers and designers, how long could you imagine it would take you to launch a pilot and be able to test that pilot across six airports from the West Coast to the East Coast and be able to do so in a way that was a true reflection of what the customer experience would actually be like?"
"We couldn't think of a way better to do that other than using dscout and sending scouts to do it. We were able to select from a diverse pool of participants who live, work, and play near these six airport locations, and they were able to download the Enterprise app, opt into this new program, and go rent a car and tell us in real time what that experience was like."
Enterprise
dscout's Diary tool offered natural moments of product engagement, whether that was in a shuttle on the way to a rental location, just before selecting a car, or even in the car before driving away. These moments created an on-the-ground, undeniable look at the real experience of current customers and made for eye-opening insights for stakeholders. That depth of detail surfaced optimization areas and moments when the experience could better serve the customer needs...all done safely and at scale.
The authenticity of the research also created some real drivers of action. Participants were honest, authentic, and shared frankly their highs and lows, which only added emphasis for the team's recommendations.
Have questions about using dscout for research? Let's talk!
Ben has a doctorate in communication studies from Arizona State University, studying “nonverbal courtship signals”, a.k.a. flirting. No, he doesn’t have dating advice for you.
