Truck Rental Company Case Study

Client profile

This truck-rental company annually serves more than 11 million DIY household moving customers. The company maintains a sizable fleet that includes trucks, trailers and towing devices. It also offers storage throughout North America, as well as moving and storage boxes and an extended line of packing supplies.

Additionally, the company is one of the largest installers of permanent trailer hitches in the automotive aftermarket. It also supplies alternative fuel for vehicles and backyard grills as one of America’s largest retailers of propane. The company has 23,000 locations across the United States and Canada.

Executive summary

As one of the largest rental fleets in the do-it-yourself (DIY) moving industry, this multinational corporation understands that small savings in time and money can produce a significant impact on their bottom line.

Frustrated with their slow and static payment processor, their payment operations team began a search for a new payment processor to help improve their data management and reduce interchange downgrades – lower-qualified transactions that are more expensive to process.

After interviewing other processors, the organization confidently chose Elavon for its detailed reporting and holistic, all-encompassing solution.

The challenge

Their payment operations team identified a major opportunity for cost-savings by quickly identifying and remediating transaction downgrades to save on interchange fees. But it was difficult to address downgrades in a timely manner, since their existing processor would take up to 30 days to provide downgrades reporting.

The report also failed to provide a full, detailed explanation for why a transaction downgrade occurred – only the initial reason was reported instead of all downgrade reasons that applied to a single transaction. This meant that whenever there was more than one reason for a downgrade, the company was unable to fully resolve the downgrades, thus continuing to incur additional interchange expense month after month. Under this reporting structure, it could take several months to fully correct a downgrade if there was more than one reason for it.

Another pain point was the file format provided by their previous processor. The format prevented their payment operations team from exporting the data to their preferred reporting software for analysis and manipulation into actionable information. Because the report was static rather than dynamic, their payment staff spent four days each month manually copying and pasting data into an Excel document and validating that each data entry was correct.

The solution

Elavon worked with the company’s payment operations team to offer a holistic solution to address their challenges and meet unique business needs. Based on the advice of Elavon payment specialists, Payments Core 365 was chosen as its reporting engine.

The Payments Core 365 reporting solution provides the company with very specific, detailed reporting on their transactions and interchange downgrades within 24 hours, instead of 30 days from their previous processor. The reports detail all the reasons why a transaction received a downgrade – not just the initial reason – making it possible to immediately address all issues at one time when correcting the downgrade.

Payments Core 365 has other benefits. The solution only requires two clicks to export data for manipulation and analysis by their team members, allowing for faster identification and remediation of downgraded transactions. The reports also highlight which downgrade categories the company can control (such as stale authorizations and missing data) to reduce the overall cost of accepting card payments. The payment operations team can even easily categorize transactions based on frequency of occurrence (number of transactions impacted by the same downgrade reason code) or more costly interchange rates, so they can reduce their overall cost of acceptance.

The rental-truck company also implemented Scoop, the payment facilitator program from Elavon Payment Solutions. The program enables them to offer Elavon payment processing to its dealers while retaining full control over the dealer experience, including boarding, funding, support and branding. With Scoop’s reporting solution, the company can analyze performance data by location and team member. The company can use this information to help their sub-merchants reduce chargebacks and downgrades and coach team members with examples of successful best practices. Scoop also simplifies management of compliance risk and due diligence by offering services that help the company verify dealers are properly adhering to their validated PCI-DSS compliance requirements.

Transforming payment operations with speed, data, detail.

When it comes to interchange and downgrade management, this major rental-truck company is now able to react more quickly. As a result, they save several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in interchange fees. The two-click reports also save them around 48 days a year formerly spent on manual data entry.

The payment operations team now has the data they need in the format they need to make quick decisions. Saving time and effort allows the team to focus more energy on running the business and supporting dealer success.

The payment operations team also appreciates the collaborative partnership Elavon offers. The director of payment operations explains – “Elavon has always treated us as a true partner. Whenever we have an issue, I have a one-to-one conversation with my relationship manager, and he brings in the solutions team so we can strategize together on how to solve it.”

The company is also poised to embrace improvements in the payments industry and capitalize on the opportunities to generate additional revenue. In the last two years, the company has expanded its ecommerce capabilities to support online truck reservation and check out, as well as a mobile app. As the number of digital transactions increase, the Elavon payment solution offers the flexibility and scalability the company needs to evolve and expand its business in the future.