Clarence Friend, a wireless industry veteran, founded Newport Beach, Calif.-based Cellular Development Systems L.P. to provide real-time call rating and billing services to the rental car industry.
Now, about four years later, his newly patented technology is being implemented in Chicago, where Enterprise Rent-A-Car has agreed to use his billing platform to monitor 2,500 car phone-equipped vehicles.
Friend began his wireless career at Motorola Inc. as an industrial sales executive in the early 1970s. He left in 1973 and worked for several other wireless companies through the next 20 years until he formed CDS in 1993.
Friend noticed several car rental companies stopped providing cellular rentals to customers because of frequent disputes about billing. The lump sum bills given to rental car customers were invariably more expensive than users had anticipated, he said. Also, airtime bills wouldn’t be calculated until some time after the car was returned, which the customer would notice on a credit-card statement a month after the fact.
“There was a lot of brouhaha at the counter,” Friend said of the ensuing complaints. But Friend said he knew if billed correctly, cellular airtime had the potential to become a huge revenue enhancement service for both the car rental company and the cellular companies looking for more customers.
He cited a National Tourist Association report that said only 25 percent of wireless phone owners bring their handsets with them while traveling. “We believe these people use their phones 5 minutes a day,” he said. Friend said he believes that given the option, car-rental customers would take advantage of a car phone when traveling and would use the phone frequently.
So he created CallTrack, a modified convergent billing and rating platform that allows for prepaid billing, call monitoring and system integration with a rental company’s reservation system and requires no modification to the handset.
According to Friend, CallTrack works with any brand phone and any carrier’s network chosen by the rental company, which provide the car phone for an added cost to its customers. To avoid billing disputes, customers can dial into the CallTrack platform and enter their credit-card information and set a prepaid limit for airtime using the keypad on the phone. Other similar systems require a card swipe slot on the phone.
“Because of the open architecture, we can interface with any reservation system,” Friend said. With this, customers may return their car at any Enterprise location and receive a bill for the exact use of airtime, including roaming and long-distance charges. For instance, if someone rents a car in Los Angeles and drives it to Denver, the Denver office will be able to access the billing information. Also, this allows friends and family of customers to call the rental company and get the mobile phone number of their loved-one’s mobile phone.
“We answer a lot of problems in this arena,” Friend said.
CDS is in the process of installing the first CallTrack platform in Chicago and Friend said he hopes to install platforms across the country for nationwide coverage in 15 months. Enterprise Rental Car in Chicago should be running with the new system in June, he said.
