Founded in the United States in 1946, Avis is one of the largest international car rental companies, operating in over 160 countries and 5,000 locations. The Finnish operations are run under the Avis brand by Helkama Rent Oy, a local licensee. Avis Finland has nearly 100 service points across the country from Helsinki to Ivalo and from Vaasa to Joensuu. The company offers flexible and comprehensive solutions that enable the cost-effective movement of people and goods, anytime and anywhere.
We had the pleasure of creating this customer story in collaboration with Tuulia Taipale, Marketing Coordinator at Avis Finland.
B2B Sales Needed New Ways to Generate Contacts
As Avis set out to develop its B2B sales, one clear area of improvement was identified: the contact methods on the website were rather formal and rigid. The goal was to provide interested business customers with an easier, lighter way to get in touch and ask about services.
The previous contact form collected extensive details about the requester and their company, but Avis Finland wanted the car inquiry process to be smoother and more illustrative with a clearer focus on the actual transportation needs.
Bot Implementation Kicks Off
The collaboration began in spring 2023 together with Leadoo’s Customer Success Manager Kristiina Suomalainen. In the first phase, various Leadoo tools including chatbots, InPageBots, VisualBots and CTA bots were rolled out across the website to collect B2B sales leads.
To mark the launch of the bots, Avis organized a naming contest among staff, which led to many creative and fun suggestions. The winning name was Avitin, a perfect fit for the Avis Finland brand and a great reflection of the bots’ mission: to help people.
“As we started adding bots to gather sales leads, we realized that it would be a great bonus if the chatbot could also handle frequently asked questions from consumers, assist with information retrieval, and at the same time reduce pressure on our customer service phone lines,” Tuulia explains.
AI Supporting Customer Service
In car rentals, customer inquiries are highly varied and it wasn’t feasible to cover all of them with pre-filled questions and answers. In January 2025, Avis began piloting Leadoo AI to handle frequently asked questions more intelligently.
Leadoo AI was fed a knowledge base containing car rental and booking terms from Avis’ websites and PDF documents from six key rental countries: Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Croatia and Finland. The AI can now answer rental condition questions for these countries in over 40 languages.
In the early phase, fine-tuning was necessary to ensure answer accuracy. For example, the AI’s ability to identify additional services and understand their availability was enhanced, as early responses weren’t always precise a typical part of deploying new AI tools.
During internal testing, focus was placed on reviewing performance and optimizing prompts. This paid off: the AI started giving more accurate answers to the most common customer questions. It was also trained to use a tone of voice consistent with the Avis brand, ensuring a seamless customer experience.
Today, Leadoo AI performs reliably and meets expectations. While the pilot is still ongoing, the results are promising.
In just a few months, Leadoo AI has handled over 1,000 customer conversations. It also serves users during evenings and weekends outside normal customer service hours. Avis Finland has noticed a clear increase in weekend conversation volume since launching the AI bot.
Smooth Collaboration and Measurable Benefits
We asked Tuulia how the collaboration with Leadoo has been:
“Bots on websites are clearly the norm these days and customers have learned to look for them. I think they complement other customer service channels well. Of course, you need to carefully define their purpose and how they operate to suit your company’s needs and we received great guidance from Leadoo on this. Overall, the collaboration has been seamless. The implementation phases were efficient and well managed, and the regular meetings with our Customer Success Manager have given us great ideas for development.”
— Tuulia Taipale, Marketing Coordinator, Avis Finland
