The rental industry is booming, evidenced by 30%+ quarterly revenue growth announcements by many rental companies. And with the economic dynamics making rental options more attractive, the industry is poised to keep growing. The question is, Which companies are positioned to capture, service, and retain new business most effectively?
Most rental businesses have used rental management software for decades to manage their inventory, customers, and sales operations. In many cases, these software solutions are running on aging infrastructure. They have highly manual workflows, and they don’t fully support e-commerce.
Now that rental volumes are increasing dramatically, misaligned software’s financial, operational, and competitive costs are high and quantifiable.
Rental software is critical for managing your business. Unfortunately, standard rental software is notoriously difficult to use. It’s often outdated and doesn’t integrate with other software programs.
This can lead to inefficiencies and errors that cost businesses time and money. Additional hidden costs that come with manual rental software can include lost productivity and increased frustration.
Unautomated Rental Software Systems Have Real Dollar Costs
Double booking the same asset is a typical result of poorly integrated and automated inventory management. It leads to frustrated customers who face delays, stressed staff who must scramble to find replacements, and lower profitability for companies that must lose sales or pay premiums for replacement assets.
Even when you avoid double bookings, employees are forced to enter data manually into multiple systems. This slows the process, increases workload, and begs for mistakes.
Unintegrated rental management software also runs the risk of incomplete orders. If you ship an asset without critical components or cables, it stops the work at the customer site until the missing pieces. We know of one rental manager who almost lost their job because equipment went out to a movie set with missing components.
Most rental management companies feel that their repeat business comes from deep relationships with their best customers. Still, the surest way to damage those deep relationships is with order failures and shipping delays.
One mishap can sour or even end long-standing relationships with key clients. Now that the pace of business is increasing and the growth opportunities are available, don’t let manual software hold you back from scaling up.
What Are the Operational and Opportunity Costs of Manual Rental Software?
Hidden costs can add up and put a strain on your business. The short-term view is that integration is too costly. Long-term, misaligned software can cost your company more than you originally paid to install and use it all these years.
And the longer your company has been using the software, the greater the challenge to replace it.
Unautomated Software Impairs Customer Service
Another problem is websites with poor user experience for clients. They’re difficult to navigate and provoke customers to leave your site. As a new customer looking for a new vendor, the chance of spending much time on one of these websites is low.
Automation can save you and your clients valuable time. Your customers don’t want to wait hours for a quote. Automated processes let them reserve and pay for their rental equipment in minutes.
Put your focus back on customer service, keep your customers happy, and let software juggle those mundane tasks.
Easy navigation and a user-friendly interface are crucial to keep customers engaged and get them to book a rental instead of bouncing over to a competitor’s website. Give customers a clean interface that’s intuitive and easy to navigate. Ensure you provide all the features you need to manage your business effectively.
Automation Improves the Customer Experience
Some veteran rental operators feel that automation will limit their personal touch with the client and weaken the relationship, but automation doesn’t reduce your customer service, it enhances it. For every mundane, repetitive task that’s automated, your experienced staff has more time to share their knowledge with customers in high-value consultations.
Let the technology do the mundane flawlessly, so your people have more time to do what only they can do.
Reduce the Hidden Costs of Manual Rental Software
Rental software is essential for rental businesses, but purchasing and implementing new software can be expensive and risky. It can be too costly to select the right software, implement it, migrate legacy data, train employees, and connect it to the storefront. And it comes with a greater risk of failure than many businesses can afford.
Often, you can extend the useful life of legacy software with some tweaks and integrations. Instead of abandoning legacy rental management software, Rēlentless can advise on customization and integration options that may be much faster, easier, and less expensive paths to the productivity improvements you seek.
If we determine that implementing new software is the only option, we can help you define, select, and implement the right software for your business and then migrate the data and support your users.
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