Michael MaozI was pumping my rental car with gas at a dark self service service station somewhere in the Middle East, and I don’t mean of the United States. The spigot stopped on the pump, the pump went off, and I started off on my way to return my car to the airport rental area.
As I eased onto the highway I noticed that the tank hadn’t actually been filled, but I was at least four litres shy. Well, it’s late at night, my flight leaves in two hours, and I did my best.
You guessed: the rental car company charged me over $75 for those missing litres. Did they take into account that I have rented cars from the same place two or three times per year for the past decade? Did they give me a discount for the dozens of times when I used only four hours of the 24 hours of the final day? Or when I paid for a week but they got the car back in five days?
You know the answer.
But they do have Twitter. And a Facebook page. They have an online community. And 24 hour a day customer service hotlines. And satisfaction surveys and and and.
So much technology, so much process, so why so little common sense on taking the long view of a relationsip?
I’m hoping that this does not sound familiar to you.
Category: CRM Customer Centric Web Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social CRM Social Networking Twitter Tags:
12 responses so far ↓
1 Michel Chiasson January 12, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Unfortunately, this happens every day as you are aware. All of this great technology creates the illusion that they are close to the customer….and “they” being the large organizations wanting to show a social media strategy.
Yet, the person at the counter “probably” could not see your historical data and even if they did, the decision to not charge 70$ to a loyal customer as not yet been decentralized to a frontline employee. They are asked to hang their brain at the door, follow the process and deal with the client. And that’s how that employee gets promoted at the end of the year and keep on promoting the culture of “pretend” service.
The real question is what will you do now? Continue with the same car rental company and say thank you for %%** with you? You vote every day with your credit card, I would be curious to see where your vote goes next time.
Great blog, I found you recently but enjoy the pertinence of your experience and how you mesh it with everyday’s business practice.
2 Social CRM: the chic new way to ignore the customer. « crm like soft January 12, 2010 at 1:21 pm
[...] rest is here: Social CRM: the chic new way to ignore the customer. 12 Jan 10 | [...]
3 uberVU - social comments January 12, 2010 at 1:24 pm
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by TweetCRM: Social CRM: the chic new way to ignore the customer. http://bit.ly/6WGmzr...
4 Christopher Morace January 12, 2010 at 8:41 pm
Michael, you make a great point that there are a lot of companies out there mistaking technology & tools for Social CRM. (And frankly there are a lot of technology vendors out there evangelizing this misconception.) There seems to be strong acknowledgement that Social CRM needs to be a philosophy and strategy focused on customer conversation toward the purpose of positive experience first and foremost.
BUT, I would suggest that some of the social technologies available now allow unprecedented opportunity for the fulfillment of this customer centric vision. I’d hate to see the early misguided use of these tools be used to substantiate the conclusion that they are worthless–they are not.
This movement is in its infancy. The best is ahead, and I believe 2010 will see progressive enterprises with clearly defined strategic make use of consumer social platforms as well as social business platforms to achieve them.
5 Dipock Das January 12, 2010 at 11:00 pm
“Got to have a Facebook page. Got to have a Twitter account”.
Sounds similar to the days when companies ran out and bought a CRM application without understanding why and what the problem was …
Buying without
a) an understanding of why such technologies are required
b) a plan to read the feedback and respond accordingly
c) considering the current system and processes you have in place right now and looking to see if some of the processes are broken (it’s always tempting to buy something new before fixing something that isn’t working right).
d) getting everyone on board with the idea.
The exciting proposition about FB and Twitter is looking at how you will deal with the fall out – as it is no longer on a 1:1 scale.
Buyers need to stop asking “do we (or you Mr Software vendor) have a Twitter account” and start asking “what do we (or you Mr Software vendor) do when things go wrong and everyone knows about it?”
6 Links 01/14/2010 January 14, 2010 at 3:30 am
[...] Social CRM: the chic new way to ignore the customer. [...]
7 Milroy January 14, 2010 at 10:34 am
Great article. Great blog.
8 Gabriel Gheorghiu January 15, 2010 at 11:13 am
Actually, it does sound very familiar
– i’m the customer of a car sharing company and these things happen quite often. But, who says that companies using social media care about their customers? Some use it to attract customers, not to make them happy.
Same thing for CRM (social or not) – just having the system will not make your sales grow and customers come (back) to you. If i were you, i would use their twitter of Facebook page to complain about it.
9 Graham Shevlin January 27, 2010 at 7:18 pm
I fired a car rental company last year (see my blog for the gory details) because they treated me like something that you scrape off the bottom of your shoe…whether they had Twitter accounts up the wazoo was kind of irrelevant, quite clearly their culture failed to recognize that I was (a) a regular client, therefore possibly worth cultivating (b) that they had previously dealt with a complaint from me on the very issue that they blew me off over. Instead they treated me like a waste of their precious time. When I blogged about it, they responded with profuse apologies, but did precisely nothing, so they remain fired.
Social media be damned, this is just appalling customer relationship management. They could have had 0 or 10 squillion Twitter accounts, blogs and Wikis, the bottom line is that they had no desire to be nice to me when I had a problem, so they lost my custom for ever. Kind of like the old saying “a fool with a tool is still a fool”….
10 I. M. Curious February 2, 2010 at 11:25 am
Somehow I think you expected the rental company to be a mind reader. How are they to distinguish you from someone who intentionally failed to refill the tank?
Your rental volume of 2-3 times per year doesn’t make you a frequent renter, so I’m not sure where your angst is coming from. You knew the tank was short as you eased onto the highway. You knew they would charge you for being less than full. Yet, you are angry they did. Why?
You \did your best\ but failed to fill the tank. If this was any other scenario, such as a work contract (i.e. \I did my best but failed to comply with the terms of the contract\) the answer would simply be: too bad, pay up.
So, I’m curious: Did you share with the car rental company your gas pump scenario upon returning the car and ask them to help you out by waiving the gas charge or did you say nothing?
Did you \do you best\ to help them understand what happened or did you simply hope your problem would go away on its own?
11 Kate @ crm systems March 29, 2010 at 11:17 pm
The general public are not that engaged in social media, and you really need to know a lot about your target audience before putting a lot of effort into that.
12 Eric Suesz April 7, 2010 at 7:42 pm
What did they say when you contacted them to complain, Michael? Since they’ve set up so many ways for you to communicate with them via social media channels, which one did you choose? What’s the name of the company? Can you provide that so they might find your complaint on this blog and respond to you? You do want to go beyond complaining and allow them to fix this situation for you and others in the future, right?
You know the answer.
E