Ultimately, what’s good for customers is good for business. Every industry experiences changes to market dynamics and improvements in services or use of technology that may alter demand. We actually work hard to help our bodyshop,
insurance and broker customers to reduce the average length of rental, which over the past year has fallen by a day within our bodyshop business.

This means we can reduce cost to our business customers, and that drivers are getting their own vehicles back sooner. If customers are getting what they want and need, that’s good business.

Fewer claims must be considered a very positive thing for drivers, even if it does impact the replacement car business. We’ve worked hard to build a customer profile that crosses many different sectors, including corporate hires, public sector and retail. As such, we’re continuing to grow, even over the last three years, and because of our private ownership and financial stability we’ve also been able to continue to keep investing in customer systems and innovation.

Our fleet consists of makes and models from all the top manufacturers, which gives us enormous flexibility in vehicle provision. We also work with a number of manufacturers to support their own replacement vehicle needs for repairs and servicing.

As a specialist in the replacement market and with the UK’s largest regional network of branches we’ve also forged relationships with most of the UK’s top insurance companies and many brokers. We work hard to provide the best value and service when it comes to replacement vehicles.

Historically, we have, and in many cases still do, work with body shops to supply a ‘top-up’ to their courtesy cars as and when they need it. But with increasing cost pressures which, according to conservative estimates, has seen a 40% decline in UK bodyshops over the last 10 years, they are often looking for ways to ease the cost burden and improve cash flow.

This has led to many repairers to examine the cost of their courtesy car fleet and turn to an outright rental solution instead. It can quickly become apparent that whilst the headline lease cost for courtesy cars may only be a few pounds a day, once you factor in the running costs associated such as unrecoverable damage and fuel costs, personnel to manage and clean the vehicles, downtime management and lost revenue as a result, the true cost can be significantly higher. The once perceived higher cost of using rental as a courtesy car solution is quickly being recognised as a far more cost effective option.

Alongside this we’re finding more bodyshops are beginning to recognise the importance of utilisation. For example, if a body shop has 100 cars being used for 70% of the time, they’re effectively running 30 cars too many. This is a cost that needn’t exist if a courtesy car programme can be flexed to suit your business demand.

It’s a fine balancing act! In any given rental we have to consider the needs of several customer groups and ensure we have the right people and systems in place to deal with each. On the day of the rental, the driver is the key customer. Their experience of the service they receive has a direct impact on how the bodyshop is perceived, how Enterprise is perceived and the driver’s overall experience.

More broadly, our role is to make sure we can work with insurers, brokers, bodyshops and everyone else involved in vehicle repair to develop a replacement car programme that meets their objectives in terms of cost, efficiency, speed and reliability. So on the day of the rental the focus should be on what we do best – renting cars with a commitment to service delivery for the renter.

The general feedback has been really positive. The scheme enables us to start to gather public opinion on the concept of electric vehicles before we bring them into our rental fleet for general use.

We decided not to rent these until our employees were familiar with them. Instead, we’re using them for our pick-up service within the M25. This gives us the chance to talk to our customers about whether they’d be interested in hiring an EV and helps overcome some of the anxieties of electric vehicles that we hear so much about.

We recognise that as one of the largest private purchasers of vehicles in the UK we have the opportunity to explore ‘new’ technologies as they become viable and commercially available. Exposing customers to electric vehicles is important as green motoring is very much part of the current and future transport agenda.

One of the areas where we are seeing significant interest is in the growth of rental as a direct replacement for a bodyshop’s own courtesy car fleet – not just as a supplementary offering. Within the replacement sector alone, there is still a huge opportunity to help bodyshops offer strategic solutions to their customers’ mobility needs.

Since coming to the UK market over 15 years ago, our main aim within the bodyshop industry has been to help control costs and drive efficiency. We want to help bodyshops build their brand and reputation by providing their customers with quality replacement cars quickly, efficiently, and at a lower cost than if they run their own fleets. This success has come from being close to our customers, which is why we’ve grown our network to over 350 UK locations, many of which are just around the corner from our bodyshop partners.