 |
An app that enables clients to check availability, book a car, and even change the details from their iphone, is well suited to a business such as rental cars, where potential customers are by their very definition mobile.
Apex director Ricki Shaw clams that it takes less than a minute to book an Apex car, and certainly when Telecommunications Review gave it a try it was very easy (unfortunately all the cars were booked out on the dates we wanted!). The Hertz app was a lot slower, but it was providing cars for a raft of international destinations, not just New Zealand towns and cities.
Shaw says the secret to creating an app is to think about it from a user’s perspective, to get inside the head space of your client: “When designing the App we wanted to make it so efficient to use that even a busy executive would prefer to make their own car rental reservations, rather than get their PA to do it for them.”
Since it was accepted into the iTunes store on 6 January, the Apex app has been downloaded about 300 times, and three bookings have been made via the app. The company has around 3,500 vehicles but Shaw says it is the busiest time of year so availability is scarce.
According to Shaw, 2010 will be a “watershed year” in which smartphones will become a ubiquitous device – not only for business people but consumers too, especially travellers and tourists.
He says it took about three weeks to develop the app and, aside from staff time, the cost was the standard $299 to download the developer’s kit from the Apple website. Apex is currently working on an app for the Google Android platform.
