Shifting customer preferences has led to massive growth in online commerce across a range of industries, including car rental services. As consumers' expectations from their online experience rise, enterprises that offer well designed online channels will be able to outcompete those that do not.
Here is how Mindtree helped a leading global provider of vehicle rental services redesign their online prepaid reservation system from end to end. By doing so, we enabled them to drive greater usability, convenience and ultimately revenue growth.
The challenge
The customer's prepaid car reservation system, based on an e-shopping cart solution, was nearing the end of its life. In particular, the legacy technical solution was impacting revenue due to multiple factors such as:
- Inability to offer new features such as upselling of ancillary products or higher end car rental
- Tightly coupled shopping cart and reservation systems, disallowing the use of outside booking engines
- Non compliance with Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Personal Identifiable Information (PII) standards
- Declining system performance leading to lower usability
- Limited scalability and therefore support for future business growth
Our solution
Recognizing that their prepaid reservation system needed an overhaul, the customer tasked Mindtree with redesigning it; equipping it with new tools and technologies; and managing the transformation journey. We then collaborated with the customer as their strategic IT partner to develop and implement a solution that met their needs.
Design: Mindtree designed a robust and scalable solution including migration to a higher version of the shopping cart platform without disturbing existing and ongoing reservations. We applied SOLID (Single responsibility, Open-closed, Liskov substitution, Interface segregation and Dependency inversion) principles to improve performance; and ensured PCI 2012 and Pll compliance. Further, an efficient audit system helped with quick debugging while a state-of-the-art user interface made reservations easier and quicker.
Tools and Technologies: We equipped the customer with next generation tools and technologies to enable the sale of ancillary products; analytics; customer feedback; performance tuning; testing and inventory management.
Management Role and Value Additions: Mindtree owned program and project management for this complex project. We conducted daily stand up meetings and early customer walkthroughs for user interface reviews. The team additionally managed five other vendors; and numerous IT and business units within the customer organization. By taking an end-to-end perspective, we were also able to propose interventions to assist the customer achieve their goals. For instance, We proposed an alternative solutions for effective business flows; thereby ensuring that project milestones were met as planned.
Business impact
- Revenue growth through best-in-class prepaid reservation functionality
- 99.9% availability to prevent revenue leakage
- Increase in revenue from prepaid reservations by 32% YOY
- Future preparedness through scalability and progress along customer's SOA roadmap
- Improved customer service through new features such as automated refund processing
- 18% year-on-year increase in look-to-book ratio
Customer testimonial
'We have a record month for prepaid sales in July with over $60MM in prepaid reservations. Great job to everyone that helped to make this program so successful.'
Director, Digital Marketing
