Corporate Social Responsibility Report continued
Community
We aim to make a positive contribution to the quality of life in the communities where we operate.
Our community investment guidelines provide that we focus on local environmental improvement and provision of free transport for community activities. In addition to this activity across our corporate and licensee network, we support UNICEF on a variety of projects. We also support initiatives which are particularly important to local staff.
Some of our 2007 activities have included:
Providing free transport – amongst others – to the following:
- “Les Restaurants du Coeur”, France. We continue to provide vans to distribute food and hot meals to the needy;
- Banco Alimentar Contra a Fome, Portugal. We provide vans to distribute food from supermarkets to charities working with children and other people in need;
- Stichting de NEES, Holland. We provide cars to transport disabled or chronically ill children;
- Latvia. For the third year running, we have provided a minibus and driver for orphaned children to attend recreational events; and
- Turkey. For International Women’s Day, we offered free rental days to women and made a donation to a foundation promoting women’s development.
Supporting staff volunteering and fundraising has continued in many countries including:
- UK. We took a staff team to the Ravenswood Village, a centre for people with learning difficulties, to renovate a garden and build a recording studio;
- charity budgets, UK. At the local level, each rental station or head office department is given a charity budget or five free “three day” car rentals to give to local charities. Nationally, Avis UK supported Macmillian Cancer Support;
- community volunteering, Spain. Any member of staff who invests at least 12 hours of their own time on community volunteering receives a contribution for their charity;
- incentivising improved performance, Italy. We make donations to “Medecins Sans Frontieres” based on improved quality performance by staff at each of the rental stations; and
- Israel. We have begun a programme to employ disadvantaged teenagers once they have returned to school to complete their education. There are currently five participants on the scheme at our headquarters and in 2008 we plan to roll the programme out across our rental stations.
Workplace
We rely on our staff to deliver the ‘We try harder.’ promise. We can only achieve this if they are highly motivated and enjoy working for Avis.
We operate in many countries with diverse employment practices. Whilst respecting local circumstances, wherever we operate we follow the principles of non-discrimination in recruitment, development, remuneration and advancement. All our employees must follow the highest standards of honesty, integrity and fairness, wherever they work. The Company gives proper consideration to applications for employment when these are received from disabled people and employs disabled people whenever suitable vacancies arise. Should an employee become disabled when working for the Company, efforts are made to continue their employment and retraining is provided if necessary.
In 2007 we have focussed on raising awareness of governance issues such as health and safety, competition compliance and acceptable codes of conduct.
Employees are kept well informed of the performance and objectives of the Group through personal briefings and email and the Company’s open management style encourages employees to contribute to the development of the business.
Each year we survey our staff and in 2007 the survey covered our five major corporate countries, as well as our international headquarters and support centres in Barcelona and Budapest. Following the impact of the previous year’s significant structural and management changes, reflecting some slightly lower satisfaction results, we are pleased to report a significant improvement in overall employee satisfaction for 2007. Overall employee satisfaction, which asks employees for “their overall satisfaction rating when taking everything into account” increased by 3.3% to 68.1%. The average rating for the whole survey, based on a total of 23 core questions, increased from 62.1% to 65.3%. Job satisfaction of our employees was over 70%, with these employees reporting that they enjoy their work and that this was the most important factor to them.
Marketplace
We aim to make Avis first choice of our customers by continually improving our service and so ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. This is especially important in ensuring brand differentiation and improving customer loyalty, in an increasingly price competitive market environment. We have made further good progress this year.
We monitor customer satisfaction principally through customer surveys and the level of complaints and each country Managing Director takes personal responsibility for monitoring and improving customer satisfaction scores.
Each month we distribute over 30,000 surveys and we receive over 5,000 replies. In line with our environmental objectives we have continued to increase the number of surveys sent out electronically wherever possible and this doubled in the year to reach 80%. Of those returned, some 80% are received back in less than three days, enabling us to pass comments on to the relevant business area for appropriate action with minimal delay.
Our four key measures of customer satisfaction remain:
- overall satisfaction;
- willingness of customers to recommend Avis (Net Promoter Score™);
- customer complaints; and
- perception of station performance.
In 2007, overall satisfaction levels, which reflect customer satisfaction “overall with the rental experience” rose by a further 2%, continuing the steady improvement we have seen over the past seven years. The net promoter score, which measures the willingness to recommend Avis to a friend, improved again, by 4%. The number of adjustments made to customer invoices reduced by 2% in 2007. The station performance score, which records the overall efficiency of the running of a station, improved by over 1% against last year.
During 2007 we continued to focus strongly on introducing further customer service initiatives, to differentiate the brand and continue to make the rental process faster, simpler and clearer for customers.
2007 saw further increases in the number of people signing up to the Avis Preferred service, underlining the improving trend in customer satisfaction and loyalty. Avis preferred sign-ups increased by 69%, while the number of active Avis preferred customers increased by 17%.
For Avis Preferred customers we began our “Three Minute Promise” programme. Under this programme we guarantee customers their keys and rental agreement within three minutes of entering the service station. If we fail, the customer receives a retail voucher for €30. We piloted the programme in France in 2007. The service is now available in 390 stations across six countries. This has provided real differentiation in the market place. In addition, our new significantly enhanced website, which improves ease of use and is designed to increase the number of customers booking directly, was rolled out across the Group in 2007.
We remain the only car rental company to have achieved the ISO 10002 – CMSAS 86:2000 standard for Quality Management Customer Satisfaction – Complaint Handling and were re-accredited in January 2008. The standard covers all our European offices and demonstrates that we follow best practice in all aspects of complaint management and continual improvement of performance.
Awards remain a strong indication of how we are seen by our customers. In September 2007, we won the SOCAP in Europe Award for Innovation at the National Customer Service Awards in London. The award was for the development and launch of the ‘We try harder.’ blog in Avis UK. The blog enables our customers to have an on-line dialogue with our marketing and customer service departments in the UK with the aim of continually reviewing and improving the services we provide.
Overall, we won a significant number of further awards internationally during 2007, including four prestigious British Travel Awards 2007: Best British Car Hire Company, Consumers Favourite Business Car Hire Company, Best Leisure Car Hire Company and Consumers Favourite Leisure Car Hire Company.
