READING, Pa., March 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Penske Truck Rental has selected Avaamo's voice-driven Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) for its phone-based truck rental central reservations call center. The goal is to further enhance Penske's truck rental reservation process by phone and drive efficiencies in its call center operations.

The IVA relies on Avaamo's Conversational IVR technology to automate and streamline the truck rental reservation process, enabling Penske's customers to easily confirm, change, or inquire about existing reservations through proactive and personalized voice calls.

To automate and simplify the reservation process for Penske's truck rental customers, Avaamo has deployed "Erica," an IVA that onboards new customers in just a few steps and enables existing Penske customers to confirm or modify their rental reservations using the virtual assistant.

For existing truck rental reservations, the IVA identifies the caller by their phone number to anticipate their request and proactively addresses their issues, saving the caller both time and effort. By maintaining context based on these customers' histories, the IVA avoids repetitive questions while also resolving the customers' issues in the quickest possible manner, drastically reducing call times. It ensures faster and easier truck rental reservations by checking whether a user's selection falls within working hours and communicating available slots to the customer. For customers needing additional assistance, a live Penske representative is also available.

"We first deployed the conversational AI system about five months ago and it has been performing well. We are impressed by the simplified phone experience it delivers for our rental customers," said Mike Krut, Senior Vice President of Information Technology at Penske Truck Leasing. "We are also seeing positive improvements related to the call center's overall performance."

Avaamo co-founder and CEO Ram Menon said, "We began collaborating with Penske in early 2019 and are delighted with our success so far. Our conversational IVR technology enables callers to speak naturally, as they would with a human agent. It empowers enterprises to provide better experiences to their stakeholders by automating business processes and eliminating live agent handoffs - a crucial requirement to maintain business continuity in this era of social distancing and remote work."

With one of the newest and among the largest rental truck fleets, Penske Truck Rental provides businesses with sleeper and day cab semi-tractors, straight trucks, flatbeds, refrigerated vans, trailers and more. Penske rents the top brands of light-duty, medium-duty and heavy-duty commercial vehicles including: Ford, GMC, Hino, Isuzu, Freightliner, International and Volvo. Penske also offers do-it-yourself movers well-maintained rental trucks as well as moving equipment, packing supplies, and accessories. Call 1-800-GO-PENSKE or visit www.pensketruckrental.com to rent a truck. Penske Truck Rental is a unit of Penske Truck Leasing.

About Penske Truck Leasing

Penske Truck Leasing is a Penske Transportation Solutions company headquartered in Reading, Pennsylvania. A leading global transportation services provider, Penske Truck Leasing operates approximately 330,000 vehicles and serves customers from more than 1,100 locations in North America, South America, Europe, Australia and Asia. Product lines include full-service truck leasing, contract maintenance, commercial and consumer truck rentals, used truck sales, transportation and warehousing management and supply chain management solutions. Visit www.pensketruckleasing.com to learn more.

About Avaamo

Avaamo is an omni-channel conversational AI platform that allows global enterprises to deliver exceptional experiences to customers, employees, and partners. Avaamo's patented artificial intelligence technology across a broad area of neural networks, speech synthesis, and deep learning, automates conversations in large enterprises including healthcare, telecom, financial services, education, retail, insurance, and many more industries. It also automates vertical specific interactions for HR, IT service desk, supply chain, and more. Avaamo automates billions of interactions annually, in over 30 languages, and integrates with 150 of the most common business applications used in the enterprise today. www.avaamo.ai

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SOURCE Penske Truck Leasing