The next generation of equipment rental services and fleet management solutions

FROM TELEHANDLERS TO excavators to forklifts and the like, almost every population center today relies on heavy equipment for construction, maintenance, and industrial activity. But rarely do we consider how such high-powered machines get to where they need to be, how they are managed—or where they go when their job is finished.

Behind those logistics is a sprawling industry of equipment rental providers, with the largest players dispatching fleets of thousands, often unwieldy, machines between just as many customers and job sites. Herc Rentals, one of the leading equipment rental providers in North America understands the breadth of this complexity.

Historically, the logistics of managing thousands of pieces of heavy equipment has been cumbersome in itself. For decades, equipment rental orders have been traditionally processed over the phone through a live account manager, which can make for a challenging customer experience—one that sharply contrasts with the seamless, efficient experience demanded by customers in today’s digital era.

It was in this gap—between customer expectations in the digital era, and the analog reality of the equipment rental industry—that Herc Rentals chief information officer Tamir Peres and his team saw an opportunity to transform the equipment rental experience. And so, with help from Deloitte Digital, Herc Rentals set out to build an innovative digital solution that would empower customers and elevate the way they manage their fleet.

Rebooting the Equipment Rental CX

The seed for this solution—later dubbed ProControl NextGen™—was first planted in 2016 when Herc Rentals president and CEO Larry Silber shared a vision of running the entire business from his smartphone—and extending that capability to Herc’s customers.

“In today’s digital society, customers expect a seamless experience for every transaction,” says Oliver Page, principal at Deloitte Digital Consulting LLP. “For equipment rental customers, that means the same experience they get when ordering and tracking delivery of a burrito through an app is what they expect when renting and sending an excavator to a jobsite."

By 2020, the vision was set for what would become an 18-month journey to digitally advance the equipment rental experience. Alongside Deloitte Digital, Herc's team spoke directly with customers to define dozens of user personas representing various needs profiles. Then they built digital test experiences and evaluated them iteratively, incorporating real-time customer feedback at every stage of development.

“We put customers at the center of our decision making, honing in on very detailed usability testing with customers to ensure the flow and interactions in the experience were exactly what they expected,” said Peres.

All this work culminated in a digital platform for equipment rental customers and operators, replete with mobile accessibility and boasting three customer-focused components: e-commerce capability, real-time fleet management, and a streamlined account management experience akin to modern online services. And just like that, decades’ worth of industry “leading practice” had been completely reimagined.

Handheld Without Hand-Holding

ProControl NextGen™ officially launched in 2022, allowing equipment renters to navigate the full customer experience from anywhere—be it a desktop computer in their office or their phone at a jobsite. It's a fluid, multi-platform experience that exists across every customer touchpoint.

ProControl NextGen™’s e-commerce capability allows users to browse information on every piece of equipment offered by Herc Rentals, with individual model specifications and even the job type they’re most suitable for.

Beyond that, ProControl NextGen™ offers one-of-a-kind fleet management capabilities for projects occurring in real time. Equipment rented out by Herc Rentals is outfitted with a telematic IoT device, delivering real-time system health, GPS, utilization data, and actionable alerts directly to the customer’s hands.

“ProControl NextGen provides our customers with real-time metrics and actionable alerts that enable them to optimize the productivity of their fleet,” Peres says. “For example, a customer can set up an actionable alert for when the utilization of the scissor lifts they have on rent fall below a certain threshold, so they can take the unproductive units off rent. While another actionable alert for forklifts that are at 100 percent utilization would trigger a request for additional forklifts to be sent to the jobsite, thus reducing downtime.”

Beyond ensuring customers have the right equipment, Herc Rentals’ ProControl NextGen™ also helps them ensure the equipment is at the right location at the right time. “For mega projects, which often call for the management of different groups on the ground, geofencing can save the day,” Peres says. “The customer can set up alerts to monitor equipment movement and location, helping them ensure the right equipment is in the right location for the right operators.”

Today, ProControl NextGen™ centralizes account management functions in the palm of a customer’s hand—everything from one-click reservations, digital invoicing and bill review, and even cost forecasting. With the dashboard’s bird’s-eye view of a customer’s real-time utilization positioning, Herc Rentals empowers them to act as apt prognosticators of what rental costs might look like in the weeks and months ahead.

Ironically, some of the clunkiest historical functions of equipment rental have involved more phone calls and paperwork than actually moving backhoes and boom lifts. Across the industry, account management has long been stuck in inefficient conventions of the past: human-to-human booking systems, paper invoicing, quarterly analytics. Now, alongside Deloitte Digital, Herc Rentals has charted a new path forward.

Double the Efficiency, Double the Impact

As much as customers have benefitted from Herc Rentals’ digital CX overhaul, the impact within the company has been just as clear. Herc Rentals reports that telematics insights have jumped 150 percent year over year, and digital service calls are up 100 percent over the same period.

What’s on the horizon for Peres and his team? Continued innovation that elevates the customer experience and solves customers’ most complex problems—from remote control over rented light towers to managing authorized access to equipment from a mobile device. These and other exciting innovations made possible with ProControl NextGen™ are game changers in equipment rental.

“Deloitte Digital has been our end-to-end supporter throughout this journey,” Peres says, citing critical support across technology selection, design, stack development across platforms, launch, and change management to activate ProControl NextGen™ in the market. But perhaps the greatest lesson imparted on Herc Rentals through this journey has been around the nature of CX innovation itself—not a destination or a static state of achievement, but limitless pathways for growth branching off at each juncture of opportunity.

“Prior to this investment, Herc Rentals was on par with our key competitors. We each had platforms that allowed for digital reservations and some telematics capabilities,” Peres said. “Today, we are head and shoulders above our competition in terms of digital CX and we will continue to innovate our ProControl NextGen platform to stay ahead.”

Learn more about the Herc Rentals digital transformation story here.