I generally rent from AVIS, because I am an AVIS Wizard member. Like any frequent traveler, I like the benefits that accrue from giving loyalty to an airline, car rental or hotel chain. With AVIS, I can get right to my car and start heading to my destination in less than five minutes. (Don’t even get me started on how long Enterprise took).
Recently, I was in Portland, Maine. My rental went smoothly, no issues at all. Following my keynote address to a group of credit union executives and board members, I returned my rental car to AVIS at the Portland airport. I told the uniformed worker that I would get my receipt over email, and again, there were no issues. It all took less than five minutes, and soon, I was heading inside and moving through security to arrive to my flight.
Now, I thought it all went smoothly, until, I didn’t get my emailed receipt. When I was back in my office two days later and working on my expense report for the trip, I was unable to access my receipt from the AVIS website. It said that my receipt wouldn’t be available until I turned the car back in. What? I had turned the car in two days before!
This wasn’t the first time this happened. Once, on a trip to Denver, my rental car was never checked in and I had to call AVIS and convince them that I had indeed returned their car. Hoping this wasn’t another similar issue, I found that I was unable to get anyone on the phone from the local AVIS office. It would only route me to the national number and there was no option to get to someone from the local Portland office.
What I did get was an email survey from AVIS, one of those “tell us how we did!” emails. So I told them exactly what I thought. In the comment section, I relayed my dissatisfaction with the receipt experience and I also gave them my email address and cell number. The next day, I got a call from an AVIS manager based in Portland. He apologized for the incident and let me know that AVIS had up to three days to get a receipt to me online, which I did not know. Most times, I have an email from AVIS before I have boarded my flight. That sets my expectation. I thanked him for the call and said I would look for my receipt in the next day. He told me it would be in my inbox in the next five minutes and that he wanted to send me some coupons for discounted future AVIS rentals.
See here is the thing: Having all the receipts is a requirement for creating an expense report. And if you don’t get the expense report to the client, you don’t get paid. It’s a critical cash flow issue. More importantly, though, is that this manager actually looked at my comment and took action. I recently wrote about a fail with Apple with my Apple Watch. I wrote similar comments on their “how did we do” email survey and no one from Apple contacted me. I do not expect things to always go right, to expect that is unreasonable. What I do expect, is that a company monitors its customer service channels and when they detect an issue, they should take immediate action to remediate that issue. The manager at AVIS expressed empathy (I am so sorry that this happened …), took corrective action (your receipt is in your inbox …) and provided some remuneration (take a free rental on us in the near future). Thanks AVIS for showing how customer service should work!