Cranking toward progress

August 24, 2009 in Blogging, Business, Ideas, problems, VRM | 3 comments

It’s been a long travel day, and we’ve got an hour to go before getting unstuck here in the Denver airport, which is in Nebraska, I think. Got an early flight out of Boston, then failed to get on by standby with two flights so far. But we’re reserved on the third, and due to arrive in Santa Barbara an hour and a quarter before tomorrow.

Anyway, my normally sunny mood, even in the midst of travel woes (one should appreciate the fact that commercial aviation involves sitting in a chair moving 500 miles an hour, seven miles up), was compromised earlier this evening by an unhappy exchange with Enterprise, the rental car company. I wrote about it in Unf*cking car rental, over in the ProjectVRM blog. It concludes constructively:

So I want to take this opportunity to appeal to anybody in a responsible position anywhere in the car rental business to work together with us at on a customer-based solution to this kind of automated lameness. It can’t be done from the inside alone. That’s been tried and proven inadequate for way too long. Leave a message below or write me at dsearls at cyber dot law dot harvard dot edu.

Let’s build The Intention Economy — based on real, existing, money-in-hand intentions of real customers, rather than the broken attention-seeking and customer-screwing system we have now.

There’s the bait. We’ll see if anybody takes it.

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3 comments

  2. Lee Duncan’s avatar

    Lee Duncan on August 28, 2009 at 10:42 am

    I shouldn’t hold your breath.

    As a consequence of the banking crisis I’ve come to the realisation that the chief executive officers and boards of our biggest corporations are nothing but employees of those organisations who look to bend the rules in order to get the maximum reward for themselves.

    So while I doubt that the CEO of Enterprise is an enlightened soul who actually gives a hoot about the customer experience, or even improving car rental significantly, at least voting with your dollar and going elsewhere is going to hurt him at some level.

    Give it enough time, and Twitter will down a few companies, I reckon – imagine if you tweeted this kind of experience to a big enough following. The crowd will follow the leaders, and the leaders are becoming publicly elected by popularity.

    I think the companies that will do well over the next 25 years will be those who focus on delivering a great customer experience and engaging with the public via social networking. Just look what’s happening in Iran and the role that Twitter/FB etc have played there. It’s a fast changing world and a dangerous one for dinosaurs now.

    Hmm, seems I should [/rant off] now!

    Great blog,

    Lee

  3. Badger’s avatar

    Badger on September 1, 2009 at 5:25 am

    existing, money-in-hand intentions of real customers, rather than the broken attention-seeking and customer-screwing system we have now. Right on! vive le customer revolution!

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