I Stepped into a Time Machine

Every now and then, I like to tell stories of either great or terrible customer experiences. Here in 2023 customer experience (CX) is, or should be, the top priority of every management team. Off-the-shelf and/or mass customizable software and hardware solutions abound across myriad industries to aid in and ensure that poor customer experience is not what your business is known for.

A mere 50 years ago, nearly everything was done by hand. Sales receipts were written on carbon-copy slips, accounting was performed in a physical ledger, and you picked up the phone to place the then-rare long-distance transaction. Yes, the process of serving the customer was deeply personalized, but looking back through the lens of time, transactions were highly inefficient and full of friction points like long waits and human error.

Today, we have come to expect and demand that friction points in the delivery of a product or service are minimized and that modern technology is applied to improve the customer experience—even in industry or product segments where margins are thin and competition is fierce. Well, this morning I have a customer service story of a company and industry segment that seems to have missed the memo of modernization and transformation to improve customer experience.

Last weekend, my wife Linda and I attended a beautiful wedding in northern California. When we arrived at San Francisco International Airport, we made our way to the rental car center to pick up our rental car. For context, during my time as CEO of Kaplan Professional, I was the member of several rental car loyalty programs and was looked after by highly competent executive assistants. So the rental car process that I’ve gotten used to is modern and efficient. Now that I’m not traveling as much, I’m no longer locked into a small subset of vendors as most of my loyalty programs have lapsed, so I decided to try renting an electric vehicle from—wait for it—Thrifty.

Since Thrifty is part of Hertz and I’ve been reasonably happy with Hertz over the years, I expected the customer experience to be roughly the same. Boy was I wrong. The first clue I should have picked up on were the pre-rental experience emails I was receiving from Hertz asking if I was ready for renting an electric vehicle. Yes, I was receiving Hertz branded emails for my Thrifty rental. This caused me to believe that the rental had somehow shifted to Hertz, so we showed up at the Hertz counter first only to find that my name was not on their rental board.

I showed the emails I had received to the counter agent and she was baffled as to why I had received Hertz-branded emails for a Thrifty rental. After ten minutes of escalation to her manager, the rep informed me that even though Hertz and Thrifty are the same company, she couldn’t help me because their systems are not connected. Worse yet, I was told that to get my car, I’d have to go to the Thrifty counter and start over.

Frustrated, we trudged down two levels to the Thrifty counter to find a line that I will politely describe as Space Mountain-esque. I immediately thought I must have just stepped into a time machine.

With my curiosity peaked, while I was in line I decided to analyze the customer experience of the renters in front of me to see if I had indeed stepped back into a rental car queue from 1996. On average, it took a minimum of ten minutes for each customer to receive their keys once they reached a rep. There was all manner of upselling and discussions about insurance coverage and fuel—all the old tricks to squeeze more $$ out of each customer. While these old tricks and mandatory agent scripts may increase revenue, they also serve to extend wait times for other customers and add to the frustration everyone is already experiencing. I doubt severely that a modern conjoint analysis would find that these tactics are truly effective after weighing all factors in the rental experience.

So after 90 minutes patiently waiting, I reached the counter. Papers were everywhere, staff was flitting about with no apparent rationale, and there was a physical board with key fobs dangling precariously from it. The only thing that was missing was a dot-matrix printer. Yes, they’d upgraded to ink-jet, but that was the extent of the process modernization the company had undertaken. To complete my transaction, the rep asked me to write some of my personally identifiable information on a piece of scratch paper so she could transcribe it into their system—information that they already had from my initial reservation! As an aside, I’d like to remind you that I was at SFO—the gateway to Silicon Valley—presumably the most technologically advanced place on the planet.

Two hours later, I stepped out of the time machine and Linda and I hopped into our Chevy Bolt EV to make our way to the opening reception for the wedding. We had a lovely weekend with friends. So what’s the lesson?

For those of you who want to relive the past and go back to the “way things were,” this story is a reminder that our past was filled with inefficiency and frustration that we accepted as part of our daily lives. My two hour time machine trip back to 1996 taught me that I don’t want to go back.

For companies like Thrifty who are still living in the past, get with the program. Your employees don’t want to live in the past and neither do your customers. But one thing is for sure - the people at the counter doing a good job with substandard resources are not being invested in and they’re certainly not being set up for success. Put your people first.

Will I ever rent from Thrifty again? I think you know the answer to that question.