Quote:
| Originally Posted by Unregistered Admin,
Did you ever ask to sit down and discuss your reocurring issues with the branch manager? I know he/she must have marketed to your company to make sure they where doing everything they could to retain your business. |
Thanks for your well-considered post.
Actually, no, they didn't try to market to my company. I began renting regularly from them and one of the employees invited me to apply for a corporate account. I was the only person at my company who rented from them, and I rented for an average of one or two days per month. I was probably a small fry when it comes to corporate customers.
Yes, I did try to talk with the employees. I was actually on pretty friendly terms with everyone there. I was a regular renter and I remembered them personally and they remembered me. Every time there was a problem I thought we were talking about it like colleagues trying to work together to solve a problem. I never "asked for the manager" because it never occurred to me to route around the people I was talking with. For every dishonored reservation, they always had a story ready, either about the car I had reserved had been in an accident, or the previous renter hadn't brought it back, or how my car was "ready" but the shuttle driver hadn't arrived yet, or they just ducked and dodged and weaved and didn't really give me a story.
Quote:
| Originally Posted by Unregistered Perhaps the two of you could have come to a solution to resolve the problem, i.e. calling the manager directly to set up your reservation due to your need to have an exact car size with a certain level of fuel ready to go for you on time everytime you needed a rental. |
You're implying a couple of things that aren't true. I didn't "need to have an exact size car". I just wanted a large sedan for me and my clients. I don't know the exact class names, but anything in the "large sedan", or "premium" or "luxury" classes would have been fine, just not a giant extended cab pickup truck or SUV which are banned from San Francisco financial district parking garages. Any car in any of those three classes would have been fine. And I had a confirmed reservation for that one class.
And I didn't need "a certain level of fuel ready to go". What I needed was a non-empty tank. A half a tank or more would have been just fine. A full tank would have been perfect.
Quote:
| Originally Posted by Unregistered I realize your response to this would be that this should happen for every customer and believe it or not it does in most branches across the different groups. It sounds to me like you had a bad experience but that because it was never brought to the managers attention until after the fact they could not correct it for you. I realize that you made your issues plain to the MT that you were dealing with at the time but please understand that the typical MT does not have the ability or the experience to fix all of the problems of the branch and may in fact carry the negative attitudes that I see reappearing over and over on this web page. They may have spun the issue to the manager and even the area manager in a different light and it becomes a he said she said issue...once again after the fact and therefore causing us to try to compensate you financially which in your case was not going to solve your problem. |
When I'm your customer, it's not my responsibility to make a judgement about the strength of your internal chain of command and decide when to "ask for the manager". The people I was talking to seemed perfectly competent and capable and the stories they were telling me indicated that the failures I was experiencing were the result of things beyond the branch's control. It didn't seem to me that insulting these employees by demanding to see the manager, who would tell me the same story, would do any good.
Also, your customer service representatives should have 100% of the authority and resources to prevent and solve these sorts of problems. It's not the customer's fault if he didn't "ask for the manager". I don't think renting cars is all that complicated; if they say they're out of cars and it's not their fault (again), why should I be responsible for mapping and navigating their management hierarchy?
I'm also not really much of an "I want to see the manager" sort of guy. I go into things expecting people are competent and will do the right thing and I think it's rude to be a demanding customer and insult the staff with the implication they're incompetent or uncooperative by demanding to see the manager. It's just not my style. I make a reservation, I want to pick up my car without a struggle.
I did, however, call the local regional office at one point and ask if there was something I wasn't understanding about the "reservation" process. I explained how I always showed up on time with a confirmed reservation and most of the time they dishonored it. I was told that after I made my reservation, I should call up the branch and ask them to "reserve" that car for me, which I thought sounded sort of like a "double secret reservation". This wasn't helpful.
Again, thanks for your well-considered posting. I too wish things could have been resolved easily and at the local level, but I tried a dozen times. Even when two vice-presidents met with me (when the site went up, it got their attention), they still were uncooperative (as for quietly overcharging corporate renters, I was told "Sometimes you get screwed, sometimes we get screwed!"; not exactly customer-focused, I think).
Admin