Customer experience as an operating discipline.
CX now plays a direct role in the company's day-to-day operation.
When leadership made CX a business mandate, they chose a technology and services partnership designed to operationalize experience at scale—creating a more coordinated way of working that continues to evolve as complexity, automation and AI accelerate.
And the results speak for themselves: promoters are now 20% more likely to rent from the company again.
When belief became
a mandate.
When a new CEO joined, customer experience became a clear expectation—not a program, but a business priority. Seeing the business through the customers’ eyes, listening in near real time and acting decisively on what customers were experiencing became part of how success was defined.
That mandate raised the bar. And exposed a gap.
They were listening—but it wasn’t enough. Frontline teams cared deeply about delivering great experiences. But customer feedback existed across journeys.
And the organization’s ability to consistently turn insight into action lagged behind its intent.
Where the model broke down.
Experience data, operational data and behavioral data lived in different places, owned by different teams and moving at different speeds. CX teams could see emerging issues. Operational teams were focused on availability and throughput.
Too often, those perspectives didn’t connect when decisions were being made.
As one leader put it:
“We weren’t lacking data. We were lacking a way to connect it and use it with confidence.”
—Senior Director, Customer Experience
As decisions accelerated, the risk became clear: without a new approach, customer experience could be valued in principle. And bypassed in execution.
A deliberate choice to operationalize CX.
To close that gap, the organization made a deliberate decision: customer experience needed to be operationalized —not just measured.
Doing that at this scale required the right technology and a partner capable of navigating both the technical and organizational complexity of the business.
The organization selected Qualtrics as its experience management platform and partnered with Walker to help embed experience insight into how the organization operates. Together, the focus shifted from collecting feedback to activating it—connecting experience insight with operational and behavioral data and aligning how teams across the business worked with it.
This approach extended beyond the core vehicle rental business to include rideshare, a subscription-based vehicle access service and vehicle sales, ensuring customer experience could be understood and acted on consistently as customers moved across offerings. The work also expanded into Customer Care, where experience insight is used to measure and manage the quality of support delivered by representatives around the world.
By treating experience as a shared operational input—across businesses, channels and teams—the organization began building a more coordinated way of working.
Customer experience stopped living in reports and started showing up in decisions, conversations and action.
From insight to answers.
But connected data is only useful if the right people can reach it—fast enough to matter.
Walker audited and cleaned the company's existing data, built a unified data warehouse across sources and configured a custom AI agent on top of it. The result: any team member can query that data in plain language. No dashboard to log into. No report to request. No analyst to wait on.
Questions that once required pulling from multiple systems now get answered in seconds:
- Which locations are struggling the most right now?
- What drove our most recent change in NPS?
- Why is one location outperforming another?
- What should we focus on to improve customer experience fastest?
The agent also knows who's asking. A local store leader asking about customer sentiment sees their location's data. A regional leader asking the same question gets the aggregate view across their scope. The right information reaches the right person—automatically.
And there's no new interface to learn. The agent connects directly to the tools teams already use.
What changed in practice.
The goal wasn’t a finished state. It was to establish an operating discipline—one capable of evolving as the business takes on more data, more automation and more advanced analytics over time.
As this new operating model took hold, the organization began to see tangible progress—across customer experience, customer behavior and how the organization learns and improves at scale.
More importantly, the outcomes created confidence—and clarity—about what comes next.
“We weren’t arguing about whether the data was right. We could see the issue clearly, and that allowed us to move.”
—Senior Director, Customer Experience
Early gains confirmed that the company was moving in the right direction, while also reinforcing a critical insight: lasting improvement wouldn’t come from isolated fixes. To scale progress across a complex, global operation, experience needed to guide more systemic change.
That realization has shaped the next phase of the CX program. The focus is now on building momentum through cross-functional engagement, deeper understanding of root causes and clear alignment on how to resolve pain points or reimagine experiences altogether. Using experience insight not just to measure outcomes, but to inform smarter decisions and more coordinated action across the business.
Looking ahead, this work is anchored around three strategic priorities: consistency, convenience and caring.
Together, these shifts signal a meaningful evolution: they are moving beyond reacting to individual signals and toward a discipline designed to continuously learn, adapt and unlock new opportunities for both customers and the business.
Expanded to 90 countries and 16 languages where transactional feedback is active.
Promoters +20% more likely to re-rent with this company.
Problem Rate −10 points by end of 2025.
NPS +50% year-over-year.
How the business operates today.
Customer experience is no longer something teams review after decisions are made. It informs how problems are identified, how priorities are set and how teams move together across the business.
That matters in an industry defined by complexity. Demand shifts constantly. Inventory is physical and location dependent. A single breakdown—fleet availability, staffing, system latency—can immediately surface in the customer experience.
At this scale, those challenges multiply. Millions of transactions each year. Countless moments where execution—not intent—defines the brand.
This operating reality didn’t emerge by accident. It was the result of deliberate choices.
What this enables next.
The company doesn’t view this shift as an endpoint.
The complexity of the business isn’t going away—and neither is the pace of change.
But the organization now has a stronger foundation. Experience, operational and behavioral insight move together, allowing them to absorb more data, embrace automation and apply future-enabled action without fragmenting understanding.
The operating discipline is embedded in how the business operates—and that’s what makes continued progress possible.
Customer experience here has just started evolving.
Don’t take our word for it.
“By putting ourselves on the other side of the counter and in our customers’ shoes, we’ve seen strong gains in our Net Promoter Scores… Our passion for a better experience will not stop here.”
Here's a few key players.
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