The Power Of Twitter

Everyone who does not understand the new way of doing things should look at this situation I was in. On Friday morning Kelli and I were supposed to get our rental car at 12pm. We had arranged for this by calling the local Enterprise Outlet days before we needed the car. Well at 11am we received a call from Enterprise saying our car would not be ready on time and their was nothing they could do. I do understand the local outlet’s issues but as far as I was concerned I had a booked reservation.

Kelli then called the 1-800 number of Enterprise and spoke with a “Manager” named Tony. He even gave her his “direct phone number” and said he could do nothing till 12 but please call him back at noon if we still had issues. Well Kelli called back and it turns out their is no such manager and they apologized and said the area manager would call us back with in 3 days. That was not going to do us any good.

So what to do – I did what any Social Media Guru would do. I jumped on Twitter and started posting tweets with the hash tag #Enterprise. Well you know what, complaining on social media actually works. I received an @ reply from Enterprisecares. This is the Enterprise Car Rental Twitter account. Elizabeth from Enterprise contacted me and ask me to email her with my concerns. My email is below:

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Hi Elizabeth,

The issue we had today was that we had booked a car rental with
Enterprise in Scarborough(Kingston road location). My wife did it
directly with the location. We got a call this morning saying that all
our cars have gone out due to insurance replacements and that we did not
know when and if we would have one. My wife reminded the agent that we
had a sports tourney in Brantford and that is why we did this. What fun
not.

To add to it more the customer service 1-800 number was n o help. A
“Manager” called Tony took the call and gave his number. When we called
back their was no such manager. Not good. I have spent many years in
customer service and I am not impressed at all.

My Wife’s name is Kelly Ellis and our home number is 647-xxx-xxxxx.

We just got a call saying a pickup was coming but it is an hour late. I
am still not happy since I do not like to be lied too and manipulated.

I have mad enough I am prepared on my social media and technology blog
to write an article called customer service that failed.

Thanks

Rob Cairns

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I was upset and told them I was going to write an article. Before I received a response from Enterprise that article would have been totally negative.

The first thing was received was call from the local store manager Gene and he said he had a car for us. This all happened within an hour. He arranged one of his staff to come pick Kelli up ASAP to get the car.

I also received the following email back from Elizabeth at Enterprise:

Mr. Cairns,

Let me begin by sincerely apologizing that your reserved rental vehicle was not available at the scheduled pick-up time. After speaking with Gene, the branch manager of that Kingston Rd. location, he informed me of the situation that led to this problem.

The entire Toronto area is running at a sold-out status, meaning that vehicles are in more than short supply. A vehicle that was out with a customer was due to be returned in time to be provided for your rental – however, that previous customer was late in returning it. As there were no available vehicles in the area to pull from, the branch had to wait for this particular vehicle to be returned. Once it was returned, that’s when we were able to come pick your wife up and get her in the vehicle.

I completely understand how frustrating this is when you’ve made advance reservation and have a function to attend only to have your travel plans delayed. However, I’m glad that we were able to get a vehicle and that Gene compensated the rate of one day of rental in apology for such lateness.

In regards to the service provided on our 800 number, that is of great concern to us as customer service is of the utmost importance. Was this ‘Tony’ possibly a Help Desk agent?

Again, I apologize for today’s incident and sincerely hope that between Gene and I, that we have made a better name for Enterprise with you. Should you need any further assistance, please let me know or reach out to Gene at 416-xxx-xxxx.

Respectfully,
Elizabeth

Enterprise Rent-A-Car
Specialty Services
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I will tell you that a big thanks go out to Elizabeth and Gene for taking care of these issues for us. They deserve a lot of credit. We need a rental car in a few weeks again and I will be renting from Enterprise. They slipped originally but due to the power of social media everything managed to get resolved.

What do you think of the power of social media?