The holidays bring families together. The travel industry makes these reunions a reality.

During the last months of the year, delivering a customer experience is all the more essential in the ultra-competitive travel and transportation markets. Nearly 30% of Americans traveled 50 miles or more during the 2013 holiday season (between December 21 and January 1), the highest number ever recorded. The AAA says that 91% of these travelers (85.8 million) traveled by automobile. The stakes will be higher than ever during the 2014 holiday season.

Even in the holiday spirit, there will no doubt be customer service issues—lots of them. Today’s customers expect service wherever they reach out, especially if they’re away from home. Nearly 10% of these customers are likely take their customer service issues to social media during their travels. This number rivals the number who would directly contact their travel agent.

As a result, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that leading rental car service Hertz now has nearly 10% of its conversations with customers over social media. What truly makes Hertz the leader in their industry though, is their ability to quickly and effectively answer these questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week across 4 rental car brands in 140 countries with 11,000 locations globally.

Just a few years ago, marketing was the sole owner of social media for the Hertz brand. Service tended to be during business hours Monday to Friday. It often took a couple of days to resolve customer issues over social media. Often times they did it via email, forwarding posts to customer service, who would then provide content for the social media team’s replies.

As longtime champions of providing great customer service wherever their customers may be, the Hertz team realized that they had to be part of the conversations that were happening about their brand in the social media space. They looked through a number of vendors, but ultimately decided that beyond just best-in-class software, they also wanted a strategic partner.

“Conversocial was head and shoulders above the other organizations that we looked at, not just for the system that they were able to provide …it was also the relationships and the collaboration that Conversocial really brought to the table that won us over,” says Hertz Director of Service Excellence Laura Smith.

Today, Hertz uses Conversocial to increase the loyalty and lifetime value of its customers, as well as to directly influence everyone watching the public social arena to rent with Hertz and increasing the loyalty and lifetime value of those served. Hertz has decreased their response time from being greater than a day to being just 15 minutesfor Twitter and just 30 minutes for Facebook, and has obtained “better efficiency and productivity of all of our employees”, Smith says. “Hertz has always been an industry leader, but our partnership with Conversocial has really allowed us to become an industry innovator.”

Working closely with Hertz, we’ve had the pleasure of creating the leading solution for enabling brands to meet their customers with great service over social media at a large scale.

With the Holiday season fast approaching, is your brand ready to provide a great customer experience of social media?

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