Driving seamless mobility management.

Driving into the digital age

Kevin Brown counts himself as lucky: every weekday he gets to work at a job he loves. Brown leads the Digital Engagement team at Ayvens, formerly LeasePlan, with a team of knowledgeable, passionate people who aren’t afraid to take on challenges.

When Brown first joined LeasePlan, it was already one of the largest vehicle leasing companies in Europe. Whether people need a vehicle for just themselves or for hundreds of employees, they want the leasing process to be clear, fast, and efficient. Unfortunately, that wasn't always the case. Many LeasePlan processes relied on paper and call centers. Meanwhile, car and ride sharing companies were disrupting the market with more convenient digital services.

For Brown and his team, the answer was clear. LeasePlan needed to transform into a fully digital business that would allow customers to handle everything online. Brown created a Center of Excellence to lead the transformation and deployed Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) to establish a single source for customer data to deliver consistent digital services across the dozens of countries where the company operates.

Creating a global data engine to power personalization

LeasePlan is already bringing together data from 71 data sources — including the Salesforce CRM, Snowflake data lakes, first-party cookies, and behavioral website data — to power personalization that shows people custom, locally relevant offers based on their needs.

With data at the center of the digital transformation, Brown wanted to launch Real-Time CDP as quickly as possible. LeasePlan got the solution running in just 3.5 months with consultancy support from Adobe Professional Services, which included process recommendations for scalable data management and an actionable roadmap for priority business use cases. “From day one, Adobe Professional Services offered a level of knowledge, support, and transparent communication that made us feel confident in our collaboration,” says Brown.

Services as unique as each customer

LeasePlan needs to speak to customers in ways that reflect their specific services and interests. Customers might see upgrade offers that relate to them when close to their lease renewal date. A small business will see different service offers compared to a major enterprise. The customer data also gets segmented for each country to make sure that regions comply with GDPR and other security regulations by only handling approved data.

Segments update in real time, which allows LeasePlan to show customers much more relevant messaging such as abandoned cart reminders across the website, social media, or emails. Marketers can also use segments to exclude customers from campaigns. Customers aren’t bothered with irrelevant offers, such as new lease deals for existing customers. Brown expects this will improve customer satisfaction by limiting ad noise while reducing ad spend by up to 25%.

Accelerating renewals with automation

Building upon the standard customer profiles, LeasePlan now automates lease renewals — a process that saves time and hassle for both customers and sales representatives. In the past, customers might get half a dozen calls from sales representatives to talk through lease options. This could be particularly time-consuming for corporate customers, where fleet managers might handle hundreds or even thousands of vehicles. The manual process of calling customers also took up a great deal of time for sales representatives.

Now Real-Time CDP plays a key role in an automated retention campaign. Customers receive a series of personalized emails that list their options depending on their contract, such as renewing the lease, purchasing the car, or leasing a different vehicle. They can consider their options and make their choice through a digital portal. The automated workflow still includes an alert for the sales representative when a customer has two weeks left on their lease, however this alert has never been triggered. Since implementing the retention campaign, all customers make their choice long before their lease is up.

“The automated renewal process keeps customers coming back because it’s so easy,” says Brown. “Sales reps tell me they get 65% of their week back because they’re not stuck making calls. That’s hours that they can spend giving great service to new customers.”

Shifting automation into high gear

Brown and his team are working hard to integrate all ALD Automotive systems to create a standard Ayvens environment. Once everything is connected, countries can start pushing the limits of automation with lead scoring, personalization for different personas, and more online services that will get customers what they need quickly without having to wait for a call from their sales rep.

“Standardization is the mother of automation,” says Brown. “With a uniform standard across countries, we can build automations to make leasing even smoother for customers. Real-Time CDP connects all of our systems so that we can continue to adapt it to our needs for years to come.”