Allied’s Rental department sits under the Allied Mobility umbrella, and helps customers across the UK who need a wheelchair accessible vehicle for a short to medium term basis. We sat down for a chat with Department Manager Rebecca Bridges to hear all about the Rentals team and how the department operates.
Explain what your department does its goals and its role in the company.
We hire wheelchair accessible vehicles (WAVs) throughout the whole of the UK.
From our Glasgow base we hire all around the UK and deal with phone and web inquiries. Our role is to book as many hires as possible, look after the customer and arrange delivery and collections throughout the the UK via the transport hubs.
We are not Motability fed, so we’ve not got any Motability business. It’s all about finding our own customers and working with Marketing to get leads that drive our own growth.
Do you have different types of customers to those you’d see with Allied Mobility sales?
It could be a customer who wants to take someone who’s in a wheelchair on holiday, for instance, or they’re coming over on holiday themselves from France, America they need a wheelchair accessible vehicle. So that would be a one or two-week hire.
But we also hire via case managers, solicitors and occupational therapists who are dealing with clients who have maybe found themselves using a wheelchair due to accident or injury, or perhaps they have a child who has outgrown a car seat and needs a wheelchair accessible vehicle. It could be that they’ve had an accident, and they’re not mentally in a place where they’re accepting of the purchase of a wheelchair accessible vehicle.
These ones are a longer-term hire, so they’ll maybe do three months to a year on a rolling basis.
A lot of these clients will then go on and purchase. We take care of them while they’re in the hiring stage, and often, if they then go on to buy a WAV, they buy through Allied Mobility.
Tell us about your key team members, and a little bit about their experience?
Janet O’Malley is Team Leader. She has worked with Allied, coming up 12 years.
Nicola Henderson is a Rentals Advisor and used to work for Hertz in Glasgow Airport. She has been at Allied nine years in September.
Chelsea Antosik is another Rentals Advisor. She came to Rentals from the Allied Mobility team. She’s been here about seven years.
Carly Skea first worked in Sales Admin and came over to Rentals when a role opened up and she interviewed for it. She’s been a year in Rentals.
So that’s the office team, and then we have Gary Learmont. He does logistics around the site, checks and preps our vehicles and valets them. He also does the checking in of vehicles and lets us know about anything maintenance-wise that needs done to them.
He used to be a driver at Allied; he was with the company for three or four years before he started in the hire team and will be nine years with us this year.
Any fun facts about the team you can share?
Janet’s whole family, pretty much, work in Allied. Her partner, Scott Abernethy, works in Allied Mobility sales, and Scott’s daughter, her stepdaughter works in Mobility Solutions.
What does a typical day in the department look like? What sort of tasks or projects might anyone be working on at any given time?
In Rental we look after our own customers, from the initial call all the way through to the customer eventually returning the car.
Whoever is the customer’s first point of contact will do the whole thing – from getting a lead, trying to quote the customer and get the booking, doing the administration of the booking, allocating the vehicle, arranging delivery and collection to taking payment.
It means that throughout the life-cycle of the hire the customer has one point of contact, and it builds trust with the customer.
We also do our own customer service here, we arrange our own demonstrations, we could be arranging repairs or insurance claims. We do all of that within this department, so it’s very varied and we deal with a lot of different departments in the business because of that. We deal with Service and Body Shop for repairs, Marketing, because work closely with them about our leads coming in, Transport for deliveries. We collaborate with all the different departments.
Any notable achievements within the department? Recent successes, creative solutions or impactful projects?
A couple of weeks ago, it was a Friday and Chelsea had a phone call from a lady who was in tears. She was terminally ill, and she needed a vehicle, and Transport couldn’t go until the Monday.
Carly volunteered to take it, even though she doesn’t work on a Saturday. She came in, picked it up, delivered it to the customer, then got two trains back here.
Things like that are not in our team’s remit, but they’ll go over and above. The biggest achievement is having staff and a team that are willing to do that to help a customer. What Carly did meant everything to that customer.
If we had just said, “well, we’re closed on Saturday, Transport can’t deliver till Monday,” that customer wouldn’t have gotten a vehicle, and it means so much.
Okay. It’s not this big, huge “achievement”, but, really, it is a huge achievement and for the company it’s going above and beyond for our customers. That’s just one example, and we have a lot of them.
What challenges does the department face and how do you overcome them?
We deal with vehicles, and sometimes you’re let down by vehicles; they don’t always run smoothly.
When an issue happens with one of our vehicles, the stakes are much higher because our customers may have no alternative options. If it’s a standard vehicle, then a customer can jump on a bus or a taxi or to get to where they need to. Our vehicles are lifelines for our customers, and if there’s a problem with them, we need to fix it as quickly as possible.
We have Mobile Techs that we can work with if they’re in the area. But the issues can be very varied, so that is probably our biggest challenge.
How does your work tie into the bigger picture at Allied? How does it support the company’s mission and enhance the customer experience?
We work under the umbrella of Allied Mobility and what we do reflects on the Allied Mobility brand. If we deliver an amazing service to our customers and really take care of them, they will purchase a vehicle from Allied Mobility when they decide to purchase rather than rent. There’s no reason for them not to do that.
Not everybody is going to buy a vehicle, but the ones that don’t, if they get a vehicle and it allows them to go on holiday and take their loved one on holiday or, for instance, the terminally ill lady who wanted to go somewhere for a week.
That’s a hugely important thing, and that’s why it matters, and that’s why we do what we do.
How can people contact Rentals if they want to get in touch about renting a WAV?
They can email info@alliedmobility.com or call Allied Mobility on 0330 191 7455.
Or they can go onto the Allied Mobility website. There’s a Hire page there and there’s button that says Contact Our Specialists; if they click that they can fill out an inquiry form, then we’ll get in touch with them.
