To honor its award-winning Hertz Gold Plus Rewards® customer loyalty program, Hertz unveiled enhanced member benefits along with a summer-long promotion offering existing and new members the opportunity to earn double bonus points on weekly rentals. The promotion runs through Sept. 30, 2014.
Some of the enhanced benefits include quicker enrollment, Mobile Gold Alerts, faster rentals, and more ways to earn points.
Elliot Friedman, Vice President, Customer Relationship Marketing, Hertz sat down with Loyalty360 and participated in a fascinating Q&A.
- What would you say are the key factors that have contributed to the success of the Hertz Gold Plus Rewards customer loyalty program during the past three years?
When designing Gold Plus Rewards, Hertz set out to develop a world-class program that enables the company to improve its customer loyalty and deliver a more personalized customer experience while delivering value to our members. Gold Plus Rewards makes it fast and easy for customers to earn elite status, offers points that don’t expire, and rewards with no blackout dates.
How much of a factor is customer feedback and listening to your customers?
As Hertz developed its Gold Plus Rewards program, careful consideration was taken into our customers’ wants and needs. In addition to addressing customer feedback, Hertz proactively reached out to its customers to ascertain what elements we could incorporate to make Hertz Gold Plus rewards one of the more robust programs in the industry.
How do you define loyalty and what does it mean to your organization?
For Hertz, loyalty is a customer’s choice to use our product, both those frequent renters who hit the road on a regular basis. And those travelers who may only need to rent a car once or twice a year. We want to be the first choice in mobility solutions and the company consumers think of when they need to rent a car. With Hertz Gold Plus Rewards, Hertz’s aim was to design a world- class program that enables us to deliver a consistent and more personal customer experience across all markets and channels while delivering value to members and non-members, making our relationships more relevant and more meaningful.
What does Customer Experience/Customer Engagement mean to your organization?
Hertz’s mission is to be the fastest, easiest car rental experience in the industry and with our reinvention, we took a deep dive into the customer experience, analyzing everything from the time spent at our locations to how we communicate with our customers. With this in mind, we’ve streamlined our locations and we’ve refined how we communicate with and listen to our customers.
Tapping into its collective voice, Hertz has been conducting more research to learn more about how our customers feel about Hertz and the travel experience. In addition, we’ve aligned our customer surveying with the brand experience to ensure we’re delivering upon our value proposition and we’ve tapped into social networks and online communities to track consumer attitudes and their overall experience with Hertz.
As a marketer, what do you see as your biggest challenge (s) in the next two years?
Keeping ahead of the curve in regards to how customers use digital technology, from mobile bookings to the consumption of media, is something we are continually focused on. For example, Hertz has offered mobile bookings for years, however, we recently upgraded our mobile sites incorporating dozens of suggestions from our customers to make the site faster and easier.
Marketers are tasked to be more data-centric than ever before, but the challenge of creating actionable insight from data is more challenging than it ever has been. What is your advice for marketers?
Embrace data. Hertz is fortunate to work with some select partners to gather and analyze the data available to us and this has helped immensely with the Hertz reinvention and how we’ve redesigned the car rental experience, from operations to having the best fleet, to providing flexible mobility solutions to fit our customers’ needs. Marketers need to understand the data available, whether using formal systems or tapping into one’s social network, and how this data can be instrumental in shaping the customer experience.
What is your customer philosophy and how does that perspective help drive more effective engagement and better marketing results?
Customers are at the heart of what Hertz does and our goal is to provide the most rewarding and personalized customer experiences in the industry. By understanding our customers’ needs, we’re able to provide the products and services that lead to greater customer satisfaction. At the end of the day, as a marketer, it’s taking all the information and data available and all the resources available to create programs that make your company stand out from the competition.