Customer Spotlight: Finding the Right Path with Data Analytics
Qlik helps Goldcar travel the world, starting with the right roadmap of data analytics.
From five cars in 1985 to over 50,000 cars today, Goldcar is a rental car company truly dedicated to helping you travel the world. Originally founded in Spain, Goldcar is now in 13 countries with a workforce of over 1,000 people.
For thousands of Europeans, Goldcar is the holiday rental company of choice, as it’s a company that prides itself on low prices, a user-friendly reservation system that guarantees booking, and impeccable customer relationship management. But with a fleet so large and with the organization spread out across a continent, Goldcar needed help managing their massive amount of data.
In 2014, Goldcar was acquired by a private equity firm, and along with this came new goals for the company. Newly hired COO Jaime Soriano was charged with revolutionizing their operations through geographic expansion, improving their quality of service, and integrating technology to improve efficiency. Most importantly, Soriano was asked to maintain centralized management; Goldcar wanted one central headquarters as opposed to a central office in each country. Faced with these challenges, Soriano commented:
“I began to consider that I needed to change the BI tool. We had some good information already but it was very difficult to manage all together, especially coming from different countries. We weren’t able to see how the data was connected; we really needed a global view. So we looked at what we needed from a BI tool: an ease of self-service, meaning the partners can find what they need, and it needed to be flexible and portable. We selected Qlik because of their associative way of thinking, how all data is connected.”
Before Qlik, Goldcar’s data management was scattered throughout Excel spreadsheets, unique to each location and department they were coming from. Soriano found that since there was no centralized way to store data, sometimes there were mistakes or oversights within the data. Since it wasn’t always reliable or easy to gain insights from, many employees were simply using intuition to make decisions instead of the data. Goldcar needed a simple dashboard that brought all aspects of the company together.
After three months since the initial Qlik installation, Goldcar had an all-encompassing Qlik dashboard which showed all the data relating to operations, commercial, finance, accounting, human resources, and more. Best of all, it was continuously updating. Every 30 minutes, the data was refreshed so it was easy to see in which locations queues were building up or where competitors were lowering prices so that Goldcar could respond swiftly. With this one dashboard, Soriano found he could manage the company:
“When you are operating from a different country, it’s easy for the headquarters to not be aware of what’s going on in other locations. At our headquarters we have four screens with Qlik dashboards up at all times that are constantly updating and showing us how each location is performing daily. You can see a map of each country with how many cars are in use, the queue for our services, and the prices in each country. We know exactly what are the problems and when we have the problems in each office.”
With Qlik, Goldcar can see live updates of their data on their dashboards and pivot quickly to readjust. They know which cars are in maintenance and for how long. They can see their staff rotation and know when to send more representatives to a certain area based on demand. Above all, they can see when problems arise and what’s causing them, giving them the ability to further improve the quality of their customer service and operations. Or, as Soriano put it:
“Qlik has enabled us to use all the same information across countries and departments. Everyone is aligned. We know what’s going well and what’s not, and because of that we can take fast, data-driven actions. The managers of the offices can all access this data and respond to it.”
As Soriano found to be true, sometimes a proper BI platform is all it takes to align an organization, even when it’s spread out across 13 countries. Goldcar has many more miles to go, and Qlik is glad to be along for the ride!
Want to hear COO Jaime Soriano tell his story in his own words? Hear it all in our Virtual Event – 2017: The Year of Data Literacy.