Flex Fleet Rental streamlines business operations and grows with Salesforce

FlexFleet Rental, a company specializing in truck rentals, faced the daunting task of optimizing its technology systems to reduce spending, increase capacity, and essentially double its business size without a significant increase in employees.

Parker Spendlove, CTO at FlexFleet Rental, joined the company in 2019, and led this mission with a strategic partnership with SaltClick, a full-service Salesforce implementation and optimization partner.

Problem: Salesforce System Optimization and Data Sync

FlexFleet Rental faced challenges in system optimization and automation of manual tasks. Their customer portal had significant issues with data synchronization, impacting the customer experience. Despite already having a license for Salesforce, its full potential was yet to be unlocked.

“At the time I was brought on, we were managing 5,000 pickup trucks in spreadsheets,” Spendlove said. “And then we had an app platform that nobody liked. … It was really a free-for-all.”

Solution: Salesforce Implementation and Boosting User Adoption

Spendlove proposed maximizing the use of Salesforce to streamline processes. He partnered with SaltClick to craft a plan for Salesforce implementation and adoption. “SaltClick played a crucial role… Working with Carolyn from SaltClick, who understood the full capabilities of Salesforce, was a game-changer for us,” Spendlove comments.

A critical initiative was the revamping of their customer portal. SaltClick used Salesforce Communities to ensure constant data synchronization, offering customers a reliable and dependable platform.

Spendlove said SaltClick’s enterprising ideas stemming from the experience of its team that sets it apart as a consultancy.

“Their developers and their consultants have a lot of experience across many different industries and can bring that experience to whatever application that you’re trying to resolve or fix. With that, they really became an extension of the team for us, not just on the implementation side, like I said, but really on the strategic side,” he said.

“And it’s really been game changing for us as far as how we plan and we plan on continuing to work with SaltClick,” he continued. “It really fits the model that we’ve tried to develop here at FlexFleet Rental, having really solid partners that can get work done and can really push the envelope as far as what we’re trying to do when it comes to technology and then support us.”

Results: FlexFleet’s New Portal Boosts Customer Use and Loyalty

The collaboration yielded impressive results, with customers overwhelmingly expressing satisfaction with the improved portal. As Spendlove reports, “Our customers find our processes cleaner and easier, and we have heard from several of them that they wouldn’t consider renting from anyone else due to the difficulty of managing their fleet without a tool like our portal.”

SaltClick’s partnership also allowed FlexFleet Rental to maintain a cost-effective business model without needing to expand a full-time development team.

The timing of the collaboration also played a significant role during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. FlexFleet Rental was able to focus on developing their platform and operations foundation. “Despite the global downturn, we managed to remain steady, even experiencing a bit of growth,” Spendlove recalls.

Post-Pandemic Success

Post-pandemic, the company saw record highs in fleet size, number of truck drivers, and revenue. Spendlove attests to the value of the groundwork laid during the pandemic: “The foundation we built with SaltClick… served as a springboard for this growth.”

Now, FlexFleet Rental is poised for further growth. “We’re exploring new rental opportunities, expanding into new markets like Canada, and even opening our own facilities to manage our vehicles.”

FlexFleet is also exploring new implementations and ways to continue to take advantage of Salesforce’s ever-evolving technology.

They’re exploring features such as apps to help them understand driver behavior, download registrations, monitor idle time or even push further into how they can forecast either accidents or damage to the vehicles.

FlexFleet is also exploring AI opportunities with Marketing Cloud to better understand their customers and how to engage with them through chatbots. Also, Spendlove foresees utilizing AI to predict and optimize when a vehicle has come to the end of its rental life and should be sold.

“Our company really runs on analytics,” Spendlove said. “We’ve got so many different analytics, everything you can imagine from fleet utilization, trying to maintain a fleet, really so many different metrics that we use across the board.”

A Promising Future with Salesforce and SaltClick

FlexFleet Rental expects its upward growth trajectory to continue, marking its presence in Utah’s top 100 fastest-growing companies for the past four years.

“If somebody were to ask me if SaltClick is a good partner, I would say absolutely. Honestly, from my experience and what we’ve done at FlexFleet Rental with SaltClick, I can’t imagine, it can actually be kind of scary for me because the work that we’ve done with them has absolutely transformed our company,” Spendlove said.

“For me to think that may not have happened is really crazy because our company is 100% a different company than it was when I got here four years ago,” he concludes. “And I think if you were to ask anybody in our organization, a big driver of that has been the SaltClick implementation of Salesforce over the last three years. It’s true, and I tell our investors that.”

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