An Open Letter to Enterprise Rent-a-Car

[rowyn]

I made a car rental reservation for noon today with Enterprise. I tried to reach the local branch to schedule a pickup starting at 11:40AM. I spent twenty minutes on hold, tried calling on a different phone, spent another few minutes on hold, gave up for 20 minutes, called back, spent another 15-20 minutes on hold, and finally gave up entirely. I was placed on hold via automated voice system. I never spoke to a human. I finally went back to the website to cancel my reservation, since there's no indication that I will ever get a pickup, or that the branch is even actually staffed today.

I tried calling Enterprise's national line, but they don't appear to have an option for "speak to a person" or "Press [X] if you are experiencing a problem contacting your local branch".

I have been using Enterprise for all of my rental cars, business or leisure, for many years. I have never before today had a problem with the local branch. The thing that really gets me most this experience isn't that I was unable to speak to a human or that I was on hold for over an hour, but that they have a 20-30 second commercial loop as their hold message. This is annoying and unpleasant to listen to ONCE. Listening to it endlessly repeated dozens of times is MADDENING. At this point in time, I am seriously considering never renting from Enterprise again, and that is solely because of the 30-second commercial loop, which turned a bad customer experience into a nightmarish one, where not only couldn't I get what I wanted, but I was unable to accomplish anything else because the horrible aggravating commercial loop destroyed my concentration.

Free advice to all companies: PLEASE DO NOT PLAY COMMERCIALS AT YOUR CUSTOMERS ON HOLD.

When I call you, I am already using your company. You have sold me! By playing a never-ending commercial at me, you are not making me more likely to use your company: you are making me MUCH LESS LIKELY. You are making the bad experience of "being on hold" into a painful and miserable one that I never want to endure again. You are alienating me. In the case of Enterprise, probably forever. Not by having some kind of staffing catastrophe for an hour, which I could forgive, but because I don't want to risk being stuck listening to that awful commercial again.

Also, I am posting this as an Open Letter because when I went to their website to complain, it let me input this whole rant but never got past telling me "please wait, submitting", until it finally timed out. So, congratulations, Enterprise, you have not only alienated me but you won't even let me tell you what you did wrong. I hope this unusual business strategy is working out for you. Sadly, it is not working out for me.

Comments

[alinsa.livejournal.com]

Yep, this sounds... utterly awful. I can totally see the kind of businessperson logic that leads to it, though! "Our commercial is great, lets play it when people are on hold, it'll increase brand loyalty." ... with nary a thought to what happens when someone gets trapped on hold for more than a minute or two. Or, if they thought about it, I'm going to guess their assumption is "that doesn't happen."


When I call you, I am already using your company. You have sold me! By playing a never-ending commercial at me, you are making me MUCH LESS LIKELY to

An old coworker called this "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory."

This also reminds me of a time I tried to buy a digitally downloaded game (really, just an Origin key) from... someone, online. Gamestop, I think. Because they had it on sale. I submit my money, and get an email a few minutes later that said "we need to have a human verify your order, this should happen within 24 hours." At which point I'm already pretty grumpy... perhaps they somehow missed the whole idea that digital downloads are supposed to be instant gratification?

48 hours later, having not yet gotten any email, I call them, spend 20 minutes on hold, finally get to talk to a human, and basically get told, "Yeah, it's usually fast, maybe they're overloaded. Can't really give you any estimate or anything. No, there's no way to bump you up in the queue or forward you to anyone, even if you just spent almost half an hour on the phone because of this."

So I cancelled my order.

This really seems like a worst-case scenario for businesses, and I'm not sure why they let it happen. In Gamestop's case, they'd managed to get me to the site (that's the hard part), take my money (also a hard part), and all they had to do was click the button that let their computer send me the number that I had already paid for, and we'd be done. But instead, they paid all the costs of getting me to the site, handling my money, paying someone to talk to me on the phone, etc, and didn't even end up with my money. They managed to derive negative value from someone who just wanted to give them money!

Oy.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

It is revolutionary, world-class "pestermer service"!

[rowyn]

"If we don't take care of the customer, eventually they'll quit bothering us."

[emgrasso.livejournal.com]

Have your previous rentals mostly been on weekdays during 'business hours'? (Either for setting them up or for the actual pickups)

I would say that Enterprise works bankers' hours but modern banks have longer hours of availability. I learned long ago that Enterprise is not suitable as an airport car rental unless your flights arrive and leave in the middle of the day on a weekday. I suspect they don't staff customer support on weekends any more than they do on weekday evenings.

The last time I used Enterprise, they cheerfully took a reservation for a rental starting at 7:30 PM at a regional airport in New Jersey, but their local rental office closed at 6 and there was no way to actually get the car that had been rented.

[rowyn]

Usually I pick up rentals on a weekday evening, often Friday around 5:30PM. I've returned cars on the weekend before, though. And I often return them just after they open on the weekends. Never been a problem before. :/

That's pretty awful about reserving a car when they're not open. Gah. I noticed Enterprise's website has been refined since your experience ... I tried to check the rental cost at a different branch and it wouldn't let me because the branch wasn't open during the hours I specified for the rental.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Unusual?

I thought annoying customers on hold was a conscious strategy to get them to stop calling support so much.

[archangelbeth]

That's what Anthem of NH *spit* does!

They loop the same 28-or-so second of music, then a commercial, then the same music. I had to listen to this for hours when trying to get signed up properly. (It took 4 tries before they took our money and gave us insurance. We are now with a different company, THANK GOODNESS.)