Failing Enterprise Blog 2005-08

The Admin talks about our online community

Wednesday, August 31st, 2005

There's a fascinating article in Slate about the problems at Dell, entitled "Is Dell Dying?". The best part is how Dell is getting hammered by a single blogger about their customer support problems. Of course, this single blogger has some real weight to throw around (he's the founder of Entertainment Weekly magazine), but his ideas about how to listen to customers and how the Internet is a great leveler are spot on.

Enterprise, of course, is a good ten or twenty years behind Dell when it comes to understanding the Internet. Dell sells products over the Internet that they actually deliver. Enterprise makes promises over the Internet that they have no intention nor capability of delivering. In a competitive market, companies who make such fundamental errors either learn quickly or suffer terribly. Enterprise seems bound and determined not to learn.

Saturday, August 27th, 2005

We've just hit another milestone this morning. With several days still to go, August has already become the first month in which Failing Enterprise has received over 1,000,000 hits. Now sure, a hit is a request for a single object with a uniquely-identified URL, and a typical page may generate several hits. Maybe a clearer statistic would be that we've served up 378,000 pages so far this month, but still, getting 1,000,000 hits per month is just amazing, especially for a simple website that does no advertising, receives no funding, and discusses the growing problems at only one company.

Given that Enterprise's web-based reservations system will still gladly take reservations the local branches have absolutely no ability to honor, and will cheerfully agree to your request to come down to the branch for a pick-up or drop-off at times when the branches are closed, I think it's safe to say the only Internet-based part of Enterprise Rent-A-Car that's working is their complaint site!

I'm astonished they can stay in business. Doesn't anyone in the senior management suite even care about this?

Friday, August 26th, 2005

In this week's Economist there's an article about undergraduate recruitment. Two interesting facts emerge:

1. Despite Enterprise's claim to hire more new college graduates than any other firm, in a recent survey asking undergraduates to name their "ideal" employer, of the top 15 firms, Enterprise was nowhere to be seen (without seeing the list, I have no idea how low they ranked).

2. There also seems to be a strong correlation between undergraduates' choice of an ideal employer and their choice of the most impressive website. When students considering a position with Enterprise search the web and stumble across Failing Enterprise (we're ranked highly in all the search engines) I suspect we put a missile into more than a few career plans. I've got your "most impressive website" right here. In fact, Failing Enterprise gets much more traffic than Enterprise's recruitment sites.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that Enterprise simply doesn't understand the Internet. Their official enterprise.com site doesn't seem to communicate with the rental part of the company at all, gladly accepting any and all reservations, even for cars that don't exist, even for pick-ups and drop-offs on days the branches are closed.

They don't seem to understand that graduating seniors are smart, see through marketing hype, and are fiercely independent about doing their own research on the web. I suspect a quick glance at our page discussing becoming a Management Trainee is enough to cross this incompetent dinosaur off a lot of interview lists.

Saturday, August 20th, 2005

Before yesterday, the previous daily record for number of discussion board posts was 104 (a record that was tied just two days previously). I don't know what happened yesterday (Fridays are typically somewhat slow days on the board) but before the clock struck midnight, there were 150 new postings! For the last several days, just about every traffic metric has been setting new records. For example, we had 4,864 visits yesterday, or a new one about every 18 seconds, and for the last seven days we've averaged 15,800 page views per day!

Some of this I still think is extra heavy search engine spider activity (which is laying the groundwork for increased traffic in the future), but of course the discussion board postings certainly aren't coming from spiders.

It's also obvious from the postings that nothing's changed at Enterprise, and I've yet received no evidence CEO Andy Taylor is even aware of the site. Sooner or later, some minion in his highly-fortified customer-proof secure office suite in St. Louis will gently explain this whole thing called The Internet and perhaps suggest he start caring about his company's online reputation.

Meanwhile, our online community just keeps growing.

Thursday, August 18th, 2005

Our Alexa ranking continues to improve. Not only are we the highest ranked (and most popular) company complaint site on the Internet, but the gap between us and our nearest competitor is now greater than ever and the gap between us and Enterprise's official web site (enterprise.com) is now closer than ever.

Page views continue to be very heavy this week, and there's evidence some of this is search engine spiders. Google and Yahoo are in a bit of a public spat about who indexes more pages. Maybe in order to prove their cases, they're both out in force with extra-hungry spiders. With over 13,000 postings on our discussion board, spiders have a lot to look at here.

Monday, August, 15th, 2005

I don't know what happened yesterday, but we served 24,861 pages, a new record. Let's see what this week brings.

I've begun to repeat myself in answering some objections posted on the discussion board, so I've decided to expand the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) Page. Your feedback would be appreciated at comments2 ((at)) failingenterprise ((dot)) com.

Sunday, August 14th, 2005

I've finished reading "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", by Malcom Gladwell. It's a really interesting read and he touches on all sorts of subjects that may not appear related on the surface, but interact in interesting ways when we give them a closer look.

The book discusses social "epidemics" and how under certain conditions, word-of-mouth, or what I like to call "viral marketing", takes off and an idea or product experiences exponential growth in the public consciousness. Of course, I hope Failing Enterprise explodes into an epidemic, and in many ways it has already. In 20 months, this simple website about one customer's complaints against Enterprise Rent-A-Car has gone from nothing to Newsweek, is the most popular company complaint site on the Internet, and over the past week has averaged 14,000 page views per day. If Failing Enterprise isn't an "epidemic", then at a minimum it's an uncomfortable rash spreading rapidly through the population.

Gladwell discusses some key points. One of them is "The Law of the Few", about how a few people can make all the difference when it comes to spreading epidemics.

He talks about Connectors, people who are so well connected to so many people ("there's strength in weak connections") that when they get excited about something, lots of people get excited about it. I'm not really a classic Connector in the sense that I haven't told many people (through written or verbal conversation) about Failing Enterprise. However, the web allows anyone to be a Connector if they can earn an audience. And so while I don't have a large list of contacts in the rental car industry, over ten thousand people know me as "Admin" on Failing Enterprise. While I lead a somewhat private life, I've become a very successful Connector on the Internet.

I'm also hearing from lots of other people who are Connectors in their local communities, such as their Enterprise branches, fraternities, or families, and they're telling me how they're spreading the word about Failing Enterprise.

Gladwell also talks about Mavens, those people who seem to gather all the available information on a topic, are generally considered experts, and genuinely want to help by passing on their learned knowledge. When it comes to being a rental car customer, I may very well be a Maven. Before creating Failing Enterprise, I did my homework, got my facts straight, thought clearly and then wrote clearly. After fifteen rentals at Enterprise, I pretty much knew what I was talking about. While I'm waiting for Enterprise to get it together, I've also rented about 40 times from other companies and have read thousands of messages on our discussion board, so I feel fairly confident in my conclusions.

Lastly, he talks about Salesmen. Since my only interactions with the Failing Enterprise community are through the web, my sales pitch for this site and the ideas behind it are limited to how I write and how I've designed the site. I've worked hard to make them both as clear, readable, understandable and easy to navigate as possible. I've repeatedly gone through the site, looking for every possible hindrance that might slow down, confuse, distract, or disrupt a viewer's experience, and I've eliminated them. I hope I come across as a reasonable guy and an astute observer who feels he shouldn't have to put up with Enterprise's obviously unethical and probably illegal practices.

I guess I'm the Salesman for Failing Enterprise, but I let the site speak for itself. I've never done any advertising or sold anything on the site. All of our growth is literally through word-of-mouth.

In summary, sure, I'm a Connector, Maven, and Salesman for Failing Enterprise, but I think Maven is my strongest role, and I play it only on the Internet. I think it's a good web site, and it seems to be working.

Gladwell also talks about the "Stickiness Factor". A very important design goal from the start was to make Failing Enterprise as sticky as possible. I want lots of page views and repeat visits. I want it to be a site where you feel you're part of the community and you're eager to return several times a day.

After receiving lots of fan mail in the first two months, I decided to add the discussion board. It turns out this is by far the most popular part of the site. Because of it, we now have a sense of community, both of customers and potential, current, and former employees working together to share information on Enterprise and advice on how to sidestep or at least work around their serious ethical lapses.

I designed the discussion board to provide as high a signal-to-noise ratio as possible. Page views are fast, and we serve up 20 postings on each page. It's easy to navigate through the discussion board and skim hundreds of postings in just a minute or two. I've banned smilies, posticons, avatars, and anything else that's just distracting. If people want to show-off or earn a reputation on the board, they have to do it through their words, not their artistic skills. I encourage spirited exposition, debate and argument.

The result is an extremely readable discussion board. Another positive contributor to this is the fact that Enterprise generally hires new college graduates, which increases the quality of the writing. I find most Internet discussion boards essentially unreadable, with all the text-messaging abbreviations and complete disdain for the normal rules of grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, paragraph structure, etc. If you're posting on a discussion board, the goal is to get read and understood, not to complete the post in as few seconds as possible.

I'm also trying to encourage a sense of "community" on the site. Regulars know who the regulars are, and we miss each other if it's been a while. For Enterprise employees, we've apparently become the "other" neighborhood bar you go to after you're done going to your neighborhood bar in the evening with your coworkers.

Lastly, my users now provide most of the new content. With 60-70 new interesting posts per day, it's worth your while to check back several times per day, and if you're on the board that often, it's easy to participate in a "conversation".

I still believe in my main goals for web design:

1. Have a hook, or a catch, that gets people interested. For us, it's the play on words in our title, and the tagline "Open Discussion About The Ongoing Problems At Enterprise Rent-A-Car". For Enterprise's 60,000 employees, many of whom are frustrated, overworked and underpaid; and for their millions of customers, that's got to be appealing.

2. Provide fast page loads. The single best predictor of web site usability is how fast the pages load. The main pages are very simple, with no Flash or animation and very little graphics. They're standard, boring text and they load fast. The discussion board is also standard, boring text and loads fast. Like craigslist, I put the value in the substance, not the style.

3. Have an easy on-ramp for newcomers. I think my pages about why I built the site and the specific reasons are easily approachable by everyone, including newcomers.

4. Provide a clear path for the user to accomplish what they came for. Failing Enterprise has a very shallow navigation structure and hierarchy. Just about everything has a link to it right on the front page.

5. Make it addictive. See the discussion on stickiness above.

6. Don't infuriate your viewers. We don't have ads of any sort, especially not pop-ups. We don't even require that you register on the board in order to post. Most people post as "Unregistered, Guest". Sure, it would be nice if everyone registered, but more speech and more conversation, which comes sometimes only with strong anonymity, is worth the price.

I think the site is fairly "sticky". According to Alexa, the average visitor views 37 pages, which has to be at least ten times the average of most other sites on the Internet, and is double that of craigslist. This seems to be a pretty good measure of stickiness.

Is Failing Enterprise an "epidemic"? I think so. The best proof is in the traffic numbers, and they just keep climbing. I get lots of messages telling me that many, many people are reading the discussion board postings, even if they aren't contributing, and that word of the site is spreading like wildfire throughout the company. Apparently, lots of managers know about the site and are hoping their employees won't find out. I'm hoping Enterprise will completely lose their minds and order their employees not to visit; that's the home run that will really make traffic skyrocket.

I've got infrastructure in place for traffic to grow by another factor of 100x. My only hope is that Enterprise will change their behavior. I hope they fix these problems, at which point I'll be glad to boast about the changes on the site, and I can go back to being a regular customer again. They, apparently, just want to continue doing business the way they have been. Our goals are in conflict. While it's true they've got 60,000 employees and 6,000 branches, I've got a simple website and an online community that's growing exponentially faster than they are. It's an interesting fight, and I'm eager to see how it develops.

CEO Andy Taylor has so far shown no signs of budging. I'm not sure he really "gets" the Internet or realizes that on Friday alone we served 23,000 pages at a site dedicated to motivating him to clean up the ethical problems in his family-owned business. Will somebody at corporate headquarters who has a web browser please tap him on the shoulder when he's in-between phone calls and tell him what's up?

According to Malcolm Gladwell and the 10,000 unique visitors on Failing Enterprise every month, he's got an epidemic on his hands.

Friday, August 12th, 2005

New fan mail arrived today. I'm glad to see we're helping more people.

The pages served count has just been going through the roof. Yesterday, Failing Enterprise served 19,203 pages, a new record, and the average for the past seven days has been over 12,000 per day. Some of this has got to be search engine spiders, I'm thinking, but still, that's a lot of pages served.

Maybe things are picking up because of a fluke in the calendar. Apparently, Enterprise employees get their annual vesting in the profit-sharing plan on July 31st, and anyone thinking of quitting obviously has an incentive to hold out until then, which makes the first week or two of August the quitting season. There's been a lot of talk on the discussion board lately about a large number of employees leaving.

Tuesday, August 9th, 2005

I've been hearing from our customers that they're getting pop-up ads from Enterprise when they first connect to Failing Enterprise. Since we don't host or sell any ads, and especially not pop-up ads, these are probably coming from adware on the users' PC's.

The first conclusion to reach from this is that Enterprise has reached a new low, using an advertising method widely considered to be invasive, intrusive, and sleazy to place their ads.

The second conclusion is that if they think people coming to Failing Enterprise are likely candidates for being persuaded by an ad for Enterprise, then they've once again proven they don't "get" the Internet and haven't spent any time on our site. This is even funnier than the the ads they've purchased on search engines in which they claim to have the link to the "official" Enterprise customer service page, hoping to differentiate it from our far more useful "unofficial" page.

Rather than trying to fight this issue, I recommend our users simply click on the ads, forcing Enterprise to pay a "click-through" fee to the adware company every time they do. If Enterprise wants to taint themselves with adware and pour marketing dollars down a rat hole, let's make sure Failing Enterprise users show some leadership in providing assistance.

Sunday, August 7th, 2005

I've been watching our traffic popularity ranking at Alexa recently and even though we've been the number one most popular company complaint site on the Internet for the past month or two, I was curious to see how we compared to complaint sites for other firms that are having some issues with their customers and reputation.

The result is our new Failing Enterprise Alexa Rankings Page.

Sure, some people hate Starbucks, Paypal, United Airlines and Wal-Mart, but Enterprise Rent-A-Car takes the prize by having customers that are the most dedicated to tearing them up on the Internet.

Harvard Business School, we're ready for our case study.

Saturday, August 6th, 2005

We've now got a Discussion Board "Best Of" page going. Please send me your suggestions at comments2 ((at)) failingenterprise ((dot)) com.

Also, we've now got over 13,000 messages on the discussion board and I keep hearing about people spending hours in there reading page after page of old messages. I'll agree there's some pretty gripping stuff in there.

I'm almost done reading "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", by Malcom Gladwell. There's some really interesting and really relevant stuff in there for Failing Enterprise. I've got a lot to think about in terms of future strategy.

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

Enterprise Rent-A-Car Is A Failing Enterprise!

Failing Enterprise Blog 2005-08