As customers grow accustomed to online commerce, car rental agencies are adding new functionalities to their web portals while making them more user-friendly to drive greater revenue from this key sales channel.
Here is how Mindtree helped a leading global car rental agency transform its web portal for greater sales readiness, usability and reliability through high-quality domain and technical skills.
The challenge
The customer's existing website, built over seven years ago, exhibited a dated interface and had limited scope for functionality expansion due to a disparate underlying technology base. For instance:
- Business stakeholders were highly dependent on the IT function for all website-related modifications
- The existing architecture made even simple changes laborious and time consuming
- Many web pages were not SEO friendly and the customer consequently had to invest a significant amount in paid search
- Every production release resulted in downtime, which affected revenue
The customer was looking for a technology partner with excellent domain knowledge and experience managing e-commerce solutions. They wanted to shift to a more flexible retail platform that could help generate substantial incremental revenue from both reservations and sales of ancillary products. They also wanted to improve the user experience, increase online agility and their merchandising capability.
Our solution
Mindtree collaborated with the customer to define a roadmap for the implementation of the new website. Specific goals for the project included:
- Delivering functionality rapidly and cost effectively in all areas of business
- Enabling personalization and content changes on the fly, with minimum involvement of the IT team
- Ensuring 99.9% site availability
Mindtree's team worked on delivering to customer expectations along a phased approach:
- Documented technical and functional requirements; and defined acceptance criteria
- Defined website development and testing iteratively
- Carried out extensive automation, load, stress and endurance tests to meet customer requirements and future business needs
- Built easy-to-use rules engine for business users
- Provided preview environments to allow business stakeholders to preview changes before making them available on the live website
- Managed the old and new websites in parallel for a period of one month prior to the public launch. And successfully retired the old portal without any downtime.
Business impact
- Savings of USD 100,000
- Smooth transition without downtime thereby preserving revenue
- Simplified reservation process and quicker response time for greater usability
- Easy customization for greater business agility and improved user experience
- SEO compliance for easier search
- On track to achieve USD 5 million in incremental EBITDA from new design
