How Touchpoint 360 and Organic Intelligence cracked the replacement rental moment
Replacement rental was already on our client’s roadmap. The route to the driver wasn’t.
A leading car rental company in the US and UK knew there was share to win among drivers who lose a car to an accident. What nobody could say was where in that journey the opportunity actually sat, or why so many drivers who were open to renting never got round to it.
Touchpoint 360 found two forks in the road, and both of them decided everything.
The challenge: A decision made on the worst day of the month
This is not a considered purchase. It happens in the middle of a bad week, tangled up with insurance calls, repair timelines, and the practical panic of having no way to get anywhere. Ask someone about it six months later and you get a tidied-up version of what happened.
The client needed three things:
- The replacement journey brought to life for stakeholders, not summarized for them
- The specific moments where drivers leak out of the journey, and where they convert
- A credible starting point for the 2027 product and experience roadmap
Getting there meant seeing the decision as it plays out rather than as customers reconstruct it, and sizing it well enough to invest behind.
Services used
The solution: Three lenses, two forks
Touchpoint 360 reads a journey through three lenses. What people say unprompted, what they can’t articulate, and what actually moves them. Each one found something the others couldn’t.
Qual found the first fork: the immediate aftermath. We sat with drivers in the shock of losing a car. That is the moment panic sets in, when someone has somewhere to be and no way to get there. It is also the moment most brands are nowhere near.
Underneath the panic sat something more mundane. Drivers did not know what their cover included, who to call, or whether taking a rental would cost them later. Complexity became a reason to disengage. They were not choosing a competitor, they were choosing not to deal with it.
Quant found the second: the claims decision window. Tracing 8,000 journeys showed where drivers commit and where they quietly drop out. On both forks, most drivers end up without a vehicle and without a plan. Most of the people open to renting never actually do.
Organic Intelligence found the opening. Reading 438 million conversations across the category revealed something the client could act on immediately: no brand was meaningfully differentiated. Nobody owned the replacement moment, because nobody had shown up in it.
The impact: A roadmap, not a readout
The work repositioned rental in the client’s own thinking. Not an upgrade a driver might treat themselves to, but a standard of care they should expect.
What that looked like in practice:
- Delivery and pickup, so the driver does not have to solve transport in order to solve transport
- A claim concierge, meeting people at the point where confusion is highest
- Presence earlier in the claims process, before the decision has already been made without them
- Every recommendation tied to the specific moment it converts, not to the journey in general
The output fed straight into the 2027 product and experience roadmap. Stakeholders got a map of where the business wins and loses drivers, rather than a summary of what drivers think.
Why it matters
Journey research usually starts too late. It picks up the story around the point of purchase, which is well after the moment that decided the outcome.
Here the decisive moment happened in the first hour after a crash, and the second one happened inside an insurance conversation the brand was not part of. Neither shows up if you start at consideration. Both show up if you read the whole journey, listen to what people say when nobody is asking, and size it properly.
Nobody owned the replacement moment. Now somebody has a plan to.
