A car rental group on one WhatsApp inbox
A Dubai car rental group ran bookings, deliveries, returns and collections across phones, personal WhatsApp and paper. Rental Ops now runs every hire as one record on WhatsApp, from booking to deposit release. A bilingual bot routes each customer to the right department, and about 40 agents work from one shared inbox.
- Client
- A Dubai car rental group
- Industry
- Car rental
- Product
- Rental Ops
The situation
Car rental in Dubai runs on WhatsApp. Customers message to book, to ask where their car is, to swap a car, to extend a hire and to ask about their deposit. The group's sales, operations, collections and accounts teams each answered on their own numbers, and the hire itself moved between a booking sheet, a paper agreement and the driver's phone.
What was broken
- Customers messaged whichever number they had, so the same question reached three people or none.
- A booking, the car given out, the agreement and the return lived in different places, so nobody saw one hire end to end.
- Drivers delivered and collected cars without a shared record of the car's condition at each hand-over.
- Deposits held on return and amounts still due were chased from memory, with no reason recorded.
What we built
A bilingual bot at the front door
An 80-node WhatsApp bot in English and Arabic asks what the customer needs and routes them to Sales, Operations, Collections or Accounts. Each department works its own queue in the shared inbox, and an agent can take over any conversation at any point.
One record for every hire
A booking captures the protection plan, extras and discounts, and the customer gets a WhatsApp confirmation. Operations allocates a car by plate number, and the customer service team completes the rental agreement against the same record.
Deliveries, exchanges and returns with condition checks
Drivers record the car's condition at delivery and at collection. Exchanges are handled on the hire record. An off-hire return holds the deposit, and anything still owed moves to collections with a reason against it.
Dashboards and task reports per team
Each department opens its own dashboard. Customer service and driver task reports show who handled what, so a manager sees the day's work without asking around.
Built on Zapelite
Rental Ops runs on Zapelite, our WhatsApp Business API platform, so the inbox, the bot and the official WhatsApp numbers are the same system. Agents can use the Zapelite AI copilot to draft replies.
How it runs day to day
A customer messages the group's WhatsApp number and the bot asks, in English or Arabic, what they need. A new booking lands with Sales; a question about a delivered car lands with Operations; a deposit question lands with Accounts. Agents pick up conversations from their department's queue in one inbox. Behind each conversation is the hire record, so whoever answers can see the booking, the car, the agreement, the driver's condition notes and what is still due.
What's next
Rental Ops is becoming a standalone product for other UAE rental companies, built from the same booking-to-collections flow this group runs every day.
Related
Start with one job
Opens an email to info@elitestack.ae with your sentence in it. Or WhatsApp us on +971 56 121 1011.