The following example describes how a rental company might integrate Fleetworks into its workflow to minimise working time and maximise revenue recovery and protection. Fleetworks is designed to improve efficiency across several back office functions that are often linked.
Goodwin Lee Investments Ltd operate car rental locations including London Heathrow and London Gatwick. Adam Haworth was responsible for the fleet PCN management and debt handling and implemented Fleetworks into the operation. The events described took place over the period of 2020 to 2022.
Historically PCNs, chargebacks, debts and accident claims were tasks allocated across different members of the Customer Service team. Fleetworks was initially introduced to provide support to the claim’s management side of the business. One big challenge was to organise the existing claims data and get accurate up to date claims status. Once the claims data was collated then the company wanted to ensure that, where liability had been accepted (or was safely assumed), they presented costs in a uniform way to minimise any delays to payment. Payment for old claims was often delayed due to costs not being clear or well explained for the third party who might take weeks to query the invoice. Fleetworks was able to ensure that claims were followed up in an identical way each time. Using the Fleetworks Reminders function, claims were able to be pursued in the timeliest way possible with pressure constantly being applied to the third parties to resolve the claims.
If payment was not forthcoming from the third-party insurer, then small claims action could be undertaken easily. All claims that were brought against insurers were settled in favour of the company.
Moving PCN management on to Fleetworks was a natural progression. Processing hundreds of PCNs a month meant that the risk of error was significant. Issues included:
Most actions within Fleetworks are tracked with a date and time stamp meaning that Charge Certificates can often be resolved by submitting evidence that the initial notice was correctly responded to. Since introducing the PCN module the company has been able to hugely reduce the number of Charge Certificates paid for and, at the time of writing, has not been required to file any Statutory Declarations or handle any bailiff visits. Unpaid tickets are much more closely checked allowing rental restrictions to be applied to clients until their accounts are settled.
The company believe that the time to handle each PCN has reduced from an average of 8 minutes to less than 2 minutes. Where a client has incurred a PCN previously and then picks up a second or third fine then the handling time to reassign a fine is as low as 30 seconds now.
Chargebacks sadly go together with PCNs in a car rental environment. Over half of all chargebacks were because of PCN related charges. The company wanted to reduce the amount of time spent on these chargebacks but ensure that the highest number were settled in their favour. Fleetworks focuses on removing data entry duplication so, if a PCN was processed via Fleetworks then most of the information required to defend a chargeback for that charge is available already. Creating a new chargeback record from the PCN module is a few seconds work. Additional documents (such as email exchanges with clients) can easily be added and then a chargeback defence can be created and submitted in a couple of minutes.
As a result of the reduction in chargeback defence preparation time the role of chargeback defence processing was reassigned to the person responsible for PCN processing.
The final piece of the puzzle was to introduce a defined debt recovery process for all unpaid PCN fees, lost chargebacks and other unpaid items. Late returns, missing fuel, damage, unpaid extensions all create car rental debts. While the company did have processes in place the application varied from site to site depending on who was processing the debts. The has defined the debt handling process and now all unpaid items are passed to Adam.
Now all unpaid items are passed into one person within the business where it can be managed and monitored.
Fleetworks offers a structured framework over which you can lay your back-office activities. Whether your back-office function is a team of one, or split across multiple sites, Fleetworks will help to take the thinking out of the process so your team can focus on the best outcome for the business. Contact Fleetworks now to begin closing the gap on where you are now with these issues, and where you want to be.
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