Sometimes I am just amazed at how companies can blow it.
What is it going to take for companies to get the message that the systems that document their businesses need to be integrated? And that how people are treated during this recession -- both good and bad -- will have a ripple effect far beyond the duration of this recession.
Today I received the above request for an evaluation of my recent Budget car rental.
This is somewhat ironic because a week ago, I was somewhat clear in my communications about the rental.
In the middle of a particularly horrendous experience last week (outlined below), I called the 800 number to complain. I was told that no one could help me, and that I needed to call customer "service" in the morning. When I did so at the special number I was given, I wound up, as one might predict, in voice response hell. After waiting quite some time, I just gave up.
I then decided to go "direct." I looked around the corporate web site for an actual person with an email address. There were very nice corporate bios of many distinguished executives, but of course no way to contact an actual person.
I then stumbled upon two actual people with emails in the press section, Alice Pereira (Manager, Public Relations) and John Barrows (Vice President, Communications and Public Affairs). Since Budget indicates that it values its customers' opinions, here is the email that I sent exactly one week ago. An e-mail to which I still have not yet received a response.
Now that I have had a chance to calm down a bit, I thought I would take a few moments to comment about the “service” I received in your name at the Orlando Airport on Sunday night.
I was travelling to deliver the keynote address at a meeting of one of my member companies. Normally I would book on Hertz or Avis. I thought I would try Budget because: a) cars were pretty scarce when I went on-line to book; and b) because I thought given the economy I would give Budget a try and possibly shift our corporate account to Budget.
When I arrived on Sunday evening, there were approximately 100 people waiting in line for cars. There were at most 2-3 people trying to serve all of these people. I waited an hour and a half and essentially went nowhere. It was clear that the people processing the customers were going far more slowly than was necessary, and could not figure out why this would be.
After an hour and half in line, I had an epiphany. I thought, if I was a Fastbreak renter, perhaps I could bypass all of this. So while waiting in line — a time in which NO ONE successfully completely the rental process -- I signed up on line for Fastbreak on my laptop. I then went out to the kiosk in the garage and got a car in five minutes.
How does this happen? How does it taken a shorter time to process the documentation for a club membership AND a car than for the car itself? The only explanation I can come up with for all of this was that this was perhaps a cynical effort at yield management — process people as slowly as possible, and perhaps some of those who had long ago booked cars at low rates, perhaps as part of a package, would bail out of frustration and the cars could be rebooked at a higher rate in a scarce market.
Here is what really got me. No one cared. Most of the people in the line had small children and had been waiting for hours with no end in sight. Many were from other countries. I shudder to think what their reports of our country would be once they got back home based on the appalling service they received. No one apologized. No one gave any explanations. Just a hundred customers, who likely will never rent from your company again, getting more and more frustrated and angry. Budget should be ashamed of the treatment these people received. These are tough times. People will have long memories of both the good and the awful service they receive.
I described my experience during my keynote on Monday. To my surprise, people in the audience — business owners, whose business you should want — applauded. People came up to me afterward and said the exact same thing had happened to them. There is no excuse for this — from a capacity management perspective you have an advantage over most businesses in that you have a pretty good idea of exactly how many customers are going to show up and when due to the link to the airline flight status.
So my question to Budget — what are you going to do about it?
I would like to know how you are going to address this situation, because I am likely to address this whole experience on my industry blog (http://www.aiim.typepad.com) or in my next magazine column (http://www.infonomicsmag.com) and would like to approach this in a somewhat even handed manner if there is another side to this tale.
So before I am labeled some sort of cranky jerk, let me say that I do understand that things can go wrong. But there is no excuse I can think of for a week to go by and receive no response to this email. And to make it worse, to send me emails which are obviously from other information systems, thanking me for joining Fastbreak and then asking for my "opinion."
These are tough times. I would imagine the Orlando Convention and Visitors Center Bureau is likely going out of its way to get people to travel in this economy and pressuring hotels and everyone else to reduce rates. I would suggest a stop over at the car rental place at MCO.
I would still like to hear from Budget. It is day 8 of my vigil.
