Front desk operations in a rental company can often be highly stressful. Dealing with a constant influx of customers, managing various inquiries and requests, whilst ensuring a consistent level of service and care can be challenging. However, it is crucial for front desk professionals to remain calm , professional and stay in control of the situation.
Renting vehicles efficiently goes beyond just managing the front desk. It requires effective and timely communication and coordination between the front desk team, cleaners, delivery drivers, mechanics, and the accounting team. This coordination is crucial for smooth operations, but it often becomes challenging under pressure.
With features such as reservation management, check-out and check-in procedures, and automated billing processes, Prohire saves time, minimises errors, and ensures a smooth customer experience. Additionally, Prohire offers fleet-wide, multi-location visibility, enabling efficient navigation through bookings and effective communication with other teams. With its intuitive interface and comprehensive system, Prohire empowers front desk teams to handle inquiries, bookings, preparation, check-out and check-in effortlessly.
With a client in front of them - and perhaps a queue behind that client - front desk speed is the key. In just a few seconds, having asked about their vehicle preference and duration of the rental, the team member can open up the allocation chart, find the relevant vehicle group and overlay the booking to generate a quote.
To help your team quickly see the status of a vehicle, the chart is colour-coded and customisable, allowing you to log whether a tracker has been fitted to a vehicle, for example, and showing you any relevant notifications.
In an ideal world, the vehicle would be available for the specified dates, and your front-of-house team can move the process to the next stage. But what if there isn’t availability on your forecourt? In that scenario, the Prohire allocation chart can display the vehicles at other branches, perhaps nearby, which could be delivered to your yard.
Having generated a quote, it’s time to enter the client’s or company’s details. Alternatively, if they’ve rented from you before, those details can be brought up quickly and easily by your team if they search for a last name, company name, email address, telephone number, account number, or licence number.
A business account with your rental company might mean the client is entitled to a special assigned rate. As a result, Prohire will recalculate the quote accordingly. With the quote generated and now assigned to the client, they can either choose to proceed – and it will become an ‘unconfirmed booking’ – or they can have it emailed to them, taking it away for private consideration.
If the client is keen to proceed and the booking has been activated in Prohire, your preparation teams now have the green light to clean, inspect, and, if necessary, fix the vehicle. At smaller businesses, the responsibility of preparation might fall to your front desk team. At the very least, they need to know which vehicles are being picked up or returned today, tomorrow and the day after to prioritise which jobs need to take place and when.
Into the Prohire arena steps the delivery diary, a breakdown of all the bookings with the vehicle’s statuses and locations. It also highlights any actions required – such as cleaning, off-roading (for maintenance), delivery or collection. Jobs can be sent to the relevant teams through the Companion App, a middle-man between them and the front desk.
Having the delivery diary on the same platform as the allocation chart allows your team to seamlessly navigate between the two without needing different login details or windows. One of the core objectives of Prohire is that the user can get from one part of the ecosystem to any other with ease.
The system also removes the possibility of things slipping through the gaps. Hires that have been returned but have outstanding balances are marked in red, allowing you to chase the client for payment should the need arise.
The system also removes the possibility of things slipping through the gaps. Hires that have been returned but have outstanding balances are marked in red, allowing you to chase the client for payment should the need arise.
This stage is a validation of everything associated with the booking. Is the client who they say they are, and are they a client that could undertake unacceptable behaviour?
To find these things out, you would likely ask for specific forms of identification, the details of which can be stored on the Prohire system and cross-referenced with our national risk database. That database will automatically notify you if the client has undertaken abusive, negligent, illegal or dangerous behaviour in the past, and, therefore, you should not lease a vehicle to them.
All being well, the client does not feature on the database and can proceed through the remainder of the guided check-out process. Because it is guided, the process ensures consistency and reduces oversights that might arise with several individuals undertaking their own version of an inspection, for example.
Whereas in days gone by, you might have marked any scratches or dents with X’s or S’s, the Companion App provides a framework for recording these things, all of which are to be highlighted on vehicle ‘splashes’. You can also use the system to log things like fuel levels and odometer readings, keeping all this information in one easily accessible place.
It’s at this stage of the process that Prohire accommodates payment. Payment can be taken via credit or debit card. Those payment details are tokenised, allowing you to charge the card if further transactions (for things such as late returns, damage, and extensions) are required.
Mirroring the consistency of check-out processes, the check-in stage starts with your team logging the vehicle’s return to the yard through the Companion App. An inspection – referring to the previous splashes – determines its condition, compared with when it left. If there is any damage, the client’s payment method – tokenised at the check-out stage – or deposit can be charged accordingly.
Finally, to complete the rental loop, Prohire’s daily diary function allocates the job of cleaning and preparing the vehicle for its next booking.
We recognise two things: that the front desk of your business is likely to be the busiest part; and that the people behind it are highly skilled, specialists in what they do. Prohire’s front desk functionalities ease the pressure felt by your team and equip them with the tools necessary to drive your business forward.
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