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Sometimes customer loyalty and service Hertz

The Things About Brands

Brand management and development is a serious investment for folks and a good deal of the effort is put forth in making sure the whole product or service a brand represents puts forth the right message to the market.  For me a brand’s promise on service is a critical buying criteria for most things, especially when it comes to leisure.

Travel as an Experience of Brands

Travel is about the most brand aware segment for me – I am just plain brand centric with my travel decisions.  Amex, Marriott and Hertz typically means everything is going to work out.  That being said I’ve seen some changes in my user experience in the last 12 months with key brands I choose to work with in the travel industry, which may be a response to the economy or inconsistent execution on common processes.  Doesn’t matter what the drivers – brand promises are more like concepts than promises it seems of late on my travels.   Recently I’ve decided I’m over a certain hotel chain micro-brand and now it appears that the economic downturn or just an over zealous regional manager looking to make his/her bonus/free Applebee’s $25 Gift Card in Reno just may make me switch my preferred car renting company from Hertz.

A Car Rental Reality

I’ve been renting with Hertz for nearly a decade and conservatively I’ve spent over $20K, which may not be a lot in the scheme of things, but kinda feels like a big number with a single vendor to me.  My most recent transaction probably won’t make me move from the brand since I think the key brand attributes are still intact:

  • A reasonable price – not great price, but worth the value
  • A well organized and coordinated frequent traveler program
  • Generally OK cars regardless of the situation – vacation, business or group travel.

The way I see it, if you can find a single company who can provide a service consistently regardless of location or the use case that’s a pretty important thing as a traveler, even if it costs a little more.  All you need is one username and password, one process to learn…..  My most recent trip started no different for the most part, but an interesting use case in customer engagement emerged from my most recent vacation rental with Hertz from even before I got my keys.

My experience online was great, got a van, needed a van.  With Burning Man in the region I expected to get above average rates, but not with Hertz an unadulterated price book was made available and I had a reservation in minutes.  I was definitely pleased to see that Hertz wouldn’t jack rates insanely because of Burning Man, as other vendors did with like product in services during the period.

My Hertz experience varied from the start, I had to pick up my keys instead of strolling straight to the car, but this happens at small airports and the service was good at the counter, albeit a little odd.   During the transaction there was this weird forced random Burning Man reference.  I go to lots of place and most interactions are absent a “why I was in town” when it comes to the car rental place.  Paraphrase below:

ME: Man, can you give me my keys

HIM: ID

ME: <hands id> Appreciate this <gets keys> thanks man

HIM: You going to burning man?

ME: Absolutely – be good, cheers!

Off to the car thinking these folks are certainly friendly and appear to be excited bout the influx of diverse folks for burning man – kinda cool…. I quickly find the van which I rented, drop in the bags and start getting in the car and I am greeted with the following “valued” Customer Message:

Well perhaps with this welcome as a customer I should have seen Burning Man remotely or minimally selected another vendor such as Enterprise car rental.  At this point, my car rental is becoming an increasingly emotional commercial transaction on both sides.  But with a week of vacation ahead and a little rational thought applied for a second or two, I understand that folks need to be aware that should they return a car with something that could be considered beyond normal wear and tear there might be a fee.

Good business – communicate with your customer your needs and the responsibility of the consumer.

Then I started thinking about the $175 charge, as a business guy, threatening essentially a 2X market rate should work and could represent a new little opportunistic profit center – good job Hertz!  I’m now well educated and aware there is some hyper sensitivity about Burning Man.

So just to let you know – cars get dirty on the playa.  After a week in the desert the car was a little over the top dirty and I clearly accepted the warning as somewhat valid, even if not customer centric, since it could be a bunch of work to clean.  I actually should know, I did it TWICE before turning it in.

Decision Cycle – Hertz clean for Crazy Price or Something else?

With warning in hand and a brief discussion on how to approach the situation, Em and I are off doing ROI and time benefit analysis as we head out on 80 W away Black Rock City.  From a brand perspective, you might not what your customers doing risk analysis and ROI right after a completed a commercial transaction  – just an idea…

As a math fan, I quickly figure out that is clearly more financially beneficial to detail the car myself after about 10 miles of discussion.   Well not really myself, someone else, was the plan but I figured I could ultimately contain my spend to say a $100 worst case.   So on our way out of the desert we had it detailed in Reno and the actual spend was only $90 with tip.

With that task done in full compliance of the warning it was on to Lake Tahoe for a couple of days.  Just as a point of information – did you know it’s dusty their too?  It not like the desert but dusty.  Yup, so the car did get a little more dusty on the ride to the lake and our gear added some dust and dirt into the van trunk area we notice when we left for the airport so we stopped for a second car cleaning.

After all, we already $80 already invested down this decision path. So a quick stop at self-service car wash just outside Carson City , only 20/25 miles from the airport,  made it on to the agenda.  We joked that it was an acceptable investment protection to purchase the following items/services:

  • Cleaning stuff – $7
  • Using Car Wash Vacuum – $3.50
  • Quick Rinse and Wax in the self-service wash – $4-ish
  • Paper towels – $2

In just under 15 minutes a clean car again!   Fast forward 25 minutes: An extra charge for having to detail the interior of the car was the verdict from Hertz, good news only $75.00.   At least, I didn’t get charged the whole $175 because I did a “good job” on the exterior, not my words but the cheerful manager who assessed the fine.  I actually think I did good job on the interior too, but you be the judge, sorry iPhone picture quality – the whole set is here..

photo.jpg by you.

Brand Integrity and Consistency

Fairly clean stuff is how I saw it and still do. Every car I rent in Chicago in the winter is dirtier – inside and out.  So just how did the consistency of the brands processes in Reno vary from standard, since no one actually looked at the interior of the car prior to my assessment of a fee?  Revenue? Gift Card?

I know that travel can sometimes be exciting and confusing, but I’m pretty sure no one opened a doors on any part of the vehicle prior to my being informed I was being charged for an interior detail.

The actual flow of the car return process deviated from the standard Hertz experience as soon as I was scanned – no inspection, no “would you like to leave it on the amex”, but a an immediate waive over of the shift manager or someone who was allowed to wear a white shirt instead of the outside uniform, regardless definitely a person of authority.  Actually a nice person I think, who instead of saying “Hello, how was your car?”, informs me that whilst I did a nice job on the outside I was still being charged for an interior clean.  Weird – as no one has STILL looked at the car interior yet….. After my being assessed the fee, a real inspection occurred which again complimented me on my thoroughness, this time on the engine, yet still resulted in a fee.

That’s my story no real point, except it make mes wonder if Hertz should have:

  • Raised my prices for the week to make it not such a damaging brand experience for me
  • Should have followed their traditional processes, like inspect the car first to provide some consistency
  • Not had a same store sales contest for the best shift manager who “up charges” the most details
  • Should just overall raise the rates of everyone to maintain quality of service and consistency
  • Not messaged me with the warning and made me more aware of the situation throughout the rental period, thus reducing the likelihood of my paying attention to the whole thing and just accepting that a fee was due.

I obviously don’t know all the drivers for the deviation from my typical brand experience, but the process and experience inconsistency is the most memorable for me, not the $75.  In the end, I think I’m like $5 ahead (less opportunity costs) and perhaps just a little more willing to choose another vendor.

Funny thing about loyalty is consistentcy can be more important than dollars for some….maybe not to Hertz.

September 11, 2008 by
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Lessons Learned: Quit early, quit often

Seth nails the sunk costs considerations in technology when evaluating how to go forward or not:

One of the most important lessons they teach in business school is to ‘ignore sunk costs’. It doesn’t matter how much time or money or effort you’ve invested in something, if that project no longer makes economic sense, you should stop.

Another benefit of quiting early? You can avoid brand erosion and profit drag by quiting quickly. Sunk costs should also not influence pricing if you make it through the toll gates. Read the whole thing here, gets a little dippy and I’m not sure what “winged”.

March 9, 2008 by
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Social Media: Reducing friction and establishing a NEW discipline

What is social media? A better question is what isn’t. It’s not big, it’s not broad and it’s not for sale for the most part. That’s a HUGE problem for traditional marketers. To keep it simple – you know social media when you see it. The Social Media Club provides this definition/framework:

Social (from Merriam Webster)
“1 : involving allies or confederates
2 a : marked by or passed in pleasant companionship with one’s friends or associates social life b: SOCIABLE c: of, relating to, or designed for sociability
3 : of or relating to human society , the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of society < social institutions>“

Media (from Merriam Webster)
” 1 : a medium of cultivation, conveyance, or expression;”

Wikipedia defines Social Media as “the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.”

By this definition social media is essentially a set of infomediary channels. These conversational channels are equally available to individuals and corporations which makes “controlling the message” or positioning the brand a little more dynamic. The dynamic and egalitarian realities are requiring organizations to add corporate bloggers, community managers and SEO folks to the payrolls to shape the discussion. This latest corporate internet frenzy does have a little bit of the “we got to be there” feel of the early internet which spawned the explosion of webmaster roles in IT which transitioned to more creative roles in marketing many organizations. Technology has a way of developing new disciplines and requiring new skills and investment in people – social media is no different. Social media may actually be organizational development writ large – a new model for organizations, Social Management.

With the new roles on the org chart comes a new worker, a connected conversationalist, where work and life are a balanced set of commingled actions which are agnostic to both place and time. I’m not saying everyone is going beduin, but personal is becoming professional and where and when work happens is different. Markets are becoming social, professionals are becoming personal and brands, at social media’s most atomic level, are their tags.

Social media is changing relationships within a business and how everyone at a company contributes to the success in the marketplace and how customers are re-defining old brands and showcasing new brands. The change will be bigger than it appears on the surface.

 

iceberg

Yes – looks are deceiving and that’s a fairly sweeping statement, but the new roles in organizations and the proliferation of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter ARE the leading indicators of change, it also loosely ties into my recent theme on corporate gardening, which I see as a good thing. (The other challenge is there is not a whole bunch of empirical data, so you take what you have and create a plausible relationship and hiring practices for social media roles is a fairly compelling data set.) Social media is on the edge of mainstream for corporations the graphic from Indeed below shows the historical growth of social media roles in the marketplace:

Social Media Job Trends

The initial focus of change in many companies is within the marketing group, but support and development jobs are also carrying the social media tag. For now, social media is changing marketing more so than any functional group. When will it be a requirement to show your social portfolio as part of the interview process? How long until there are generally accepted new media launch toolkits and methodologies in the marketplace which start showing up on monster profiles and ads?

Understanding/Overstating/Underestimating the Impact

Social media is not so much about direct influence of revenue, but more of a market optimizer – which DOES impact revenue. Current revenue streams AND future opportunities. Essentially social media aids in making markets more efficient with pervasive communication, connectivity and real-time transaction capabilities. It’s a fundamental change in market mechanics.

 

Cogs

 

Think about it – People buy from people right? Social media is about people. Not huge logic jump that times they are a changin. The change in the mechanics can be seen in the rise of social media platforms as preferred places for interaction and research for many consumers/individuals/employees. The emergence of the social customer isn’t just the re-tooling of word of mouth marketing, it is a change in influential scale – a single customer’s opinion can now influence 1000’s of prospects, not just a handful at the barbershop.

Social media is essentially just starting to prime the market pump – removing the air from traditional “brand out” messaging and requiring more substance for “brand flow”. It will clearly take some more time to have all the “plumbing” in place and air out of the line, but we can see that folks removing the air from the buying process, such as Cushman’s Toyota Yaris experiment. Don’t like the pump metaphor – another way to look at it is as a market lubricant which reduces transactional friction caused by the legacy market mechanics.

A Frictionless Market

Markets traditionally are made less efficient due to brokers, intermediaries, traditional marketing, limited access, price variability and the inherent transactional costs of the exchanging goods of value. The fundamental mechanics of communication, value creation and brand management has been diffused into a community of infomediaries – customers, former customers, competitor customers, employees and former employees. For good or ill access to people, information and influence impacts loyalty, awareness and product placement. There is a downside – the risk of commoditization exists with the reduction of transactional friction in the market. Easier to compare, easier to shop – essentially accelerated discovery and understanding.

The Back End Brand

Discovery and access is changing the messaging imperative from who can shout the loudest to the biggest poplution to be considerably narrower engagement – a conversation. Reviews, diggs and micro-content will essentially piece together a brand mosaic which is the brand identity. Today marketers spend time, energy and money on developing mass awareness and cultivating a sense of value before the commercial transaction. Social media is allowing the customer to do this now in parallel.

Essentially the front end brand investment seen today, will need to shift product focus on service and the ability to influence the conversation in a segment. Brand management has moved from perpetuating a mass market myth to influencing post transactional conversations and community lore. Ultimately social media transitions the definition of brand and value to the service chain.

If this is the case – should customer care/support be part of marketing? Or should support be a standalone product with a product manager? Is this the new portfolio manager? This is going to be an exciting time and good market change. So as a marketer, manager or contributors what can you learn and unlearn to leverage this change in the mechanics of the market? I don’t know what the future holds, but I thank Jeremiah and for getting me thinking about it based on the Tweet below:

@oracletechnet says community managers (before social media) used to be called ‘editors’. I’d say they were called Support or Account team

Not sure I made a point, but sometimes you just have to press publish and move on…..

March 9, 2008 by
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