Quote:
| Originally Posted by BoughtIn Admin, yes I am talking about the customer service web form on the website. Every morning I see the Regional VP's secretary going through complaints and distributing them to the regional and area managers. They are expected to call on every single one and report back to the RVP with what steps they took to resolve the problem. This isn't a rumor. I've seen it first hand. Have you ever tried to go this route? |
Thank you for the informative post. I always appreciate good writing, hard facts, and clear thinking here on the discussion board.
I'm impressed that they take these steps with the complaints. But there are still two issues:
1. If they really do take complaints seriously, why refuse to listen to your customers through the telephone, fax, land mail, or e-mail? If a blind web form is all you offer, I'd say you're afraid of hearing from your customers and want to make it hard for them to do so.
And what if you're actually driving in an Enterprise rental car and you've got your cell phone? You'd have to stop, get out of the car, go find an Internet connection somewhere, fill out a web form and then wait a day for a response?
For a counter example, I went through a fast food drive-through a couple of weeks ago and on the window, right where every driver could see it, and in big bold letters, was a sign from corporate headquarters, with their toll-free number, saying something equivalent to "If something wasn't right, we want to hear about it". Now there's a company who's not afraid of their customers.
Yes, Enterprise provides a blind web form. Would the net effect be any different if the policy was "Sure, let's
technically provide a way for customers to reach customer service, but let's make it as hard as possible"?
You have 700,000 cars in your fleet. There's absolutely no good reason why you don't have a 24-hour toll-free number providing customer service to those 700,000 drivers.
Have a look at the page in which Enterprise boasts of their
"Culture of Customer Service". Have you noticed that on this page there's not a single way to actually
contact Customer Service? Someday, Harvard Business School will teach a case study about insular, arrogant companies that just don't get it, and a printout of this page will be part of the syllabus.
2. And yes, I did actually fill out a web form and submit it. This, of course, was after a dozen failed attempts to get things resolved with the local managers and calling the local regional office. On the web form I told them I'd created
www.FailingEnterprise.com. A couple of Vice Presidents came out to meet with me. They sympathized, empathized, apologized, and then when I asked them what they were going to do to actually fix the specific problems, on each one they either outright refused or they clammed up. As they left, they said "Well, we know what we need to work on". It's been 16 months, and I still haven't heard back from them.
That sounds more like "Customer Service Avoidance" than "Customer Service" to me.
In conclusion, it seems to me that Enterprise hides from their customers to the greatest degree possible while providing the absolute bare minimum method of contacting Customer Service, and then when they do actually listen to the customer, the strategy seems to be "Let's let him vent, and then maybe he'll go away and we won't actually have to change anything".
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you earn a web site like
www.FailingEnterprise.com.