Failing Enterprise Blog 2005-06

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The Admin talks about our online community

Friday, June 24th, 2005

It's been obvious from the web server logs for some time now that most people when searching for Enterprise on the Internet use the more casual "Enterprise Rent A Car" spelling variant rather than the official "Enterprise Rent-A-Car" style.  Until now the site has been optimized for the more formal hyphenated style, but it's obviously not ranking as high in search engines as it could with the more popular non-hyphenated style.

Since my goal is to reach as many people as possible, I've changed the spelling on many of the pages to reflect the more common style.  I'm also submitting the site again to the three main search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN Search) and asking them to spider it again.

The most common phrase people search for is "Enterprise Rent A Car" and for this we're currently in the 11-14 range on the three big search engines, which is at the top of the second page for most people.  By making this change, I hope to see us ranking higher, on the most important first page, and increasing our rate of search engine referrals.

Not that we're doing too badly already when it comes to search engine ranking.  For all of these phrases:

"Enterprise Rent-A-Car complaints"
"Enterprise Rent-A-Car customer service"
"Enterprise Rent-A-Car sucks"
"hate Enterprise Rent A Car"
"Enterlies"
"Enterprise Rent-A-Car Human Resources"

we're #1 on Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search !

Given that Enterprise is a $7.4 billion a year company, with 6,000 retail locations, and I'm just a guy with a simple web site, I think we're doing pretty well.

Monday, June 20th, 2005

I think we're starting to have some effect over at Enterprise Rent-A-Car headquarters, particularly in that one tiny little department that's allowed to actually go out and interact with the Internet.  When searching for "Enterprise Rent-A-Car Customer Service" on search.msn.com and on www.yahoo.com, I see they've actually purchased an ad which claims to direct you to their "official customer service page".  When you click on it, you get referred to this lame page which boasts of their "Culture of Customer Service".  Apparently the "Culture of Customer Service" isn't strong enough to overcome the "Culture of Hiding From Customers" because all mention of how you might actually contact customer service has been deliberately removed from the page.

Sure, there's a link to a "Contact Us" page, which contains a link falsely labeled "E-mail Us" which takes you to a web form and doesn't actually provide an e-mail address.  Nowhere is there a phone number, fax number or mailing address to contact them.

I think what's happening here is that our page on Enterprise Rent-A-Car Customer Service, which is the Internet's most useful page on Customer Service at Enterprise, is ranking too high in the search engine listings (#1 on Google and Yahoo, for example), and Enterprise is freaking out and buying ads to ensure their pseudo-resource page has a chance to get seen.  They're apparently having this weird internal conflict, where they don't actually want their customers to be able to contact them, but they also don't want someone else to provide a useful page on Customer Service to their customers.

It's doubly embarrassing for them because they now obviously have to describe their page as the "official" Customer Service page to differentiate it from our page, which is far more useful, but, alas, "unofficial".  Ours exists to provide service to our customers; theirs exists apparently to avoid providing a service to their customers.

Google, MSN, and Yahoo naturally rank more useful pages higher.  Because Enterprise's page is so much less useful, they're now paying to have a "sponsored" link at the top.

They still don't "get" the Internet.

Saturday, June 18th, 2005

More good news!  The discussion board just got its 10,000th posting!  About 4,000 of the first messages were either truncated off the original discussion board at our third-party host or didn't make the transfer over to our internally-hosted board almost three months ago, so there have actually been around 14,000 messages.  But there are a full 10,000 on the board now!  Also, the average number of posts per day keeps rising; we're up to 60 now.

Friday, June 17th, 2005

We've got another reason to celebrate today.  According to Alexa, we're now the #4 most popular web site in their "Consumer Information > Complaints" category.  However, given that the three more popular sites aren't about a specific company, but are for aggregating complaints from all companies, we can now truthfully claim we're the most popular company-specific complaint site on the Internet!  Until yesterday, PayPalSucks.com had a higher ranking than we did, but we've now passed them.

Many American consumers hate Microsoft, Starbucks, United Airlines, PayPal, etc., but Enterprise Rent-A-Car's complaint site is now more popular than the hate sites for any of those firms.  I suspect that since Enterprise won't even let their branches have Internet access (there are rumors this may change, but the rumors have been circulating for years), most senior managers probably don't even know we exist.  Maybe someone will send them a memo someday, explaining what the Internet is, and then pointing them towards Failing Enterprise.

Thursday, June 16th, 2005

We hit a milestone today.  The discussion board now has 1,000 threads on it!  Sure, there were probably 400 more on the original discussion board which got deleted or didn't transfer over, but we've got a full thousand on the board now.

I would like to remind everyone that the search function on the discussion board is really useful and fast.  It's easy to search for anything, including your region, city, state, or Group number.

Saturday, June 4th, 2005

I see from our web server log that we're now serving over 8,000 page views per day, a new record.  The numbers of sites and visits per day are also growing at a rate of 25% - 30% per month.  We'll soon be up to 10,000 page views per day, which just amazes me for a site that's never done any advertising or sold anything.  Word of mouth works, especially when you're offering something people really want and have never been able to find before.

Yahoo is also reporting that some 7,700 web pages now have links to Failing Enterprise, although I suspect most of these are pages within Failing Enterprise, particularly within our discussion board.

I see there are some more messages on the discussion board written in German, so I've created a forum just for postings in German.  Enterprise is expanding in Germany so it's only appropriate that Failing Enterprise expand in Germany.  I want people to be able to communicate in whichever language works best for them.  More free speech is better than less, even if it's in a language I can't read or write.

I've heard rumors about Hertz Local Edition (HLE) not doing well and perhaps canceling a car order or two this summer.  I've also heard that Ford is considering selling Hertz.  If anyone has any information about the possibility of Enterprise buying Hertz, please let me know.  You can send me a private message on the discussion board (if you're registered), or post an anonymous message on the board, or send me an e-mail at comments2 ((at)) failingenterprise ((dot)) com.  I'll protect your privacy.

Our strategy of making the site as attractive as possible and easy to navigate for search engine spiders is paying off.  Last month, we averaged 162 page referrals per day from the big three search engines (Google, MSN, and Yahoo).  For the first three days of June, we've averaged 230 page referrals per day.  This means 230 people per day are searching for something on a search engine (probably looking either for a rental car or job at Enterprise) and are clicking on a link that brings them to Failing Enterprise where I suspect their hopes and dreams for Enterprise get crushed.  For most of these people, these search engine referrals are their first introduction to Failing Enterprise.

Two hundred new people per day are finding out about Failing Enterprise.  Enterprise's bottom line financial losses due to potential customers and potential employees deciding maybe Enterprise isn't the right way to go have got to be enormous, but clearly they'd rather suffer these losses than admit they've got a problem. 

What's it going to take to convince Enterprise to change their ways?

More on Enterprise car rental at the Failing Enterprise home page.