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This is a quick ‘Hello and goodbye, but see you soon’, as I’m about to go on holiday to New Zealand for a fortnight. While I’m there I’ll be renting from Avis, so I’ll be experiencing what it’s like from the other side of the fence (they don’t roll out the red carpet for employees, and probably won’t know I work for Avis anyway in Wellington!).

As part of the Avis Service Excellence team, I pore over our customer surveys each month to see people’s suggestions on how we should improve our service. Of course, there are some things we aren’t able to do, and some that are unrealistic, but then with others we think, ‘Genius, we would never have thought of that!’

For the survey, we contact renters from all our locations in the UK, and an external company sends us back the results (it’s important to have an impartial, unbiased view). We’re developing the survey all the time, and sending it out to more people. It’s all part of how we’ve been trying to build up a closer dialogue with our customers.

The first part of our survey asks, ‘Would you recommend Avis to a friend?’ and gives you the chance to rate us between 0 and 10. I’m glad to say the final score we’ve had from all your responses has been increasing consistently in the last year, so we must be doing something right!

The second section asks about how satisfied you are with the service – from the courtesy of the agent when you collected your car, to how easy it was to bring it back. We can see which regions and even which individual offices you say are doing things well. This means we can target the ones that need to improve, and the ones that are doing a great job can pass on their tips to everyone else.

As you can see, we’re not sitting around and waiting for people to shout at us, we’re going out and saying: ‘We want to know!’

So if you’ve got a genius idea, why not tell us about it here now? And I’ll let you know about my New Zealand adventures when I get back!

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