Last month my beautiful little town experienced both an earthquake and tornado on the same day it was pretty exciting, luckily no casualties. A few moments after the storm passed I went to check out the damage, turns out my former employer discount car & truck rental had been damaged - out came my phone it was time for twitpics.
I got home later that night and was going through the images, I came across a few I took of the damaged cars and thought it would be neat to share the photos so I searched them out on facebook and what I found was a future blog post topic.
I could just post a link to the group and anyone who hasn't been living under a rock can tell you what's wrong. Seems as though someone got facebook happy and started a group on behalf of discount car & truck rental, and then either walked away (possibly rented a car and drove away) or panicked when they saw a less than impressed customer had written on their wall for all to see.
Basically the customer had gone on to write about the less than stellar customer service he had received, charges for damages that weren't his* and overall BEWARE of this company. No one from discount even acknowledged this customer, yeah sure maybe there was nothing they could have done about the charges those things happen but there are so many opportunities to have made it right for this customer and made it right publicly. I think its safe to say their facebook group did the exact opposite of what they were trying to achieve. Its kinda of sad to see, I really enjoyed working for discount and was pretty happy to find them on facebook but what a let down. Seriously though if anyone from Discount Car and Truck Rentals reads this, get your online social presence together there is potential for awesome!
What the people at this company need to realize is not every person using their services wants to be, you have people who just got evicted or divorced and need a moving vehicle, families who are on their way to the cottage and break down, or people who just got into a car accident and have weeks of stress ahead of them. Be ready for these types of people in addition to your loyal 'one - two -- free' customers to comment on your facebook page for better or worse. I bet when one of your on-call agents gets a family back on the road during after hours so they can continue their vacation your awesome online presence will allow these stories to be told.
(*In discounts defense everyone who damages a rental vehicle says it wasn't them, if you've seen the movie jackass you know what I'm talking about)
The Ex-Hubster ran into this problem when he was running his business (tattoo shop). They ran into some issues and had to let a piercer and an apprentice tattooist go. These guys were still part of the group, and proceeded to come online and bash the shop, the ex and his girlfriend for how they ran it, and started a rival boycott group. In fairness though, quite a few people came to their defense as well in regards to the service they had received.
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