Failing Enterprise Blog 2006-04
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The Admin talks about our online community
Sunday, April 30th
Chevy Tahoe Ads
Our page on the new do-it-yourself Chevy Tahoe ads was a big
success and was viewed 2,200 times. Unfortunately, the contest
is over and Chevy (after receiving over 5,700,000 entries), has
pulled down the pages with our most helpful Failing Enterprise ads.
We'll look for other opportunities to get the word out about Failing
Enterprise.
Customer Service Telephone Number
After two and a half years of our browbeating Enterprise for
deliberately removing their Customer Service telephone number from
their website and thus becoming the only retail company I've ever
heard of whose Customer Service department doesn't take phone calls,
they've finally caved in and added the number back to their web
site. You can see it
here.
The number is 1-800-264-6350.
Attention CEO Andy Taylor: This is a good start. Now
let's make some progress on the "book, don't look" bait-and-switch
scam. Oh, and why does Steve Weidner still have a job there
when he's explicitly ordering his employees to violate your
"Founding Values"? Do these Founding Values still apply, or
are they just something your marketing people put up on the web site
for show?
New Discussion Board Registration Requirement
As of Sunday, 2006-04-23, the discussion board now requires you
to be logged in to post a message. The initial policy of
allowing unregistered users to post was intended to encourage a more
open discussion flow and allow the greatest possible anonymity,
particularly useful for Enterprise employees after their bosses have
threatened panic firings for employees blowing the whistle here on Failing Enterprise.
We've always known this policy would have to change eventually,
and that we'd have to require registration, but we put it off as
long as possible. Our continued growth (this month has already
set another record for number of unique hosts visiting) has made it
harder to maintain our original culture without some way to rein in
the more outrageous hit-and-run posters.
It was time for us to grow up and be more like other large active
discussion boards and require registration. I suspect that for
the short-term, at least, this will result in fewer but higher
quality postings.
Remember that if you do register, Failing Enterprise will never
reveal anything about you to anyone, ever, and especially not to
Enterprise. Your registration information is private to us.
Update Traffic Statistics
I've also updated our
Traffic Report. Traffic just keeps growing.
Monday, April 3rd
It appears Enterprise's strategy for dealing with Failing
Enterprise is to ignore its customers and employees for as long as
humanly possible, plus at least several months after that. I
have long suspected that where it's really going to pinch is in
recruitment and retention, and I'm hearing more evidence of this all
the time.
I've been hearing that a very senior HR person is complaining
Failing Enterprise is causing them increasing problems.
Specifically:
- They have to monitor the discussion board constantly.
- An increasing number of employment candidates are declining
job offers, saying they've been reading about the company on
Failing Enterprise.
- The latest batch of exit interviews came back with employees
claiming that hearing about other employees' experiences on
Failing Enterprise was a significant factor in their decision to
quit.
Here at Failing Enterprise, we keep trying to shame Enterprise
into doing what's right. They seem to have some sort of
logic-proof force field up preventing them from seeing the
reputational damage they're suffering by treating their customers so
poorly, probably because loss of customers and business doesn't show
up as a single line item "expense" and doesn't appear to affect
commission checks. However, if the screaming from HR people
about recruiting and retention gets bad enough, sooner or later
somebody might have to listen.
This month will be the General Manager's Meeting here in the U.S.
and next month will be the Manager's Meeting in Orlando. I
hope they all get a chance to sit around and talk about the growing
forces that are starting to affect their business. Are they
going to proactively get in front of these problems, or are they
going to let their short-term personal incomes prevent them from
doing what needs to be done?
Look what happened to those Enron guys; on top of the world right
up until the day they collapsed.
Sunday, April 2nd
Traffic at Failing Enterprise just keeps growing! For
March, we set a new record of 153,027 web visits from 18,061 unique
IP addresses. This means the average IP address comes back 8.5
times per month. Talk about web stickiness! Once people
discover Failing Enterprise, they tend to come back again and again.
The discussion board now has over 40,000 messages, which is ten
times as many as we had just one year ago.
More on Enterprise
car rental at the Failing Enterprise home page. |
