Failing Enterprise Blog 2005-04
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The Admin talks about our online community
Saturday, April 30th, 2005
I'm seeing some more updates on Google. If you search for
"Enterprise Rent-A-Car reservation" or "Enterprise Rent-A-Car
Customer Service", you'll see we're the very first listing.
That's got to hurt, but it's nice to see Google recognizing our
efforts to provide the most useful possible information for our
community members. We're here to help.
I've also heard from an employee in Canada this week who explains
that on his branch's Windows-based PC, he's been able to surf
Failing Enterprise just fine, up until this week, when it appears
Enterprise has instituted web site blocking through a product called
Surf Control.
I am reminded of a famous British headline that exclaimed
"Channel Fogged-in, Continent Cut-off". When it comes to the
Brits, this is a charming case of self-importance for which I, for
one, am willing to give them a lot of slack. But Enterprise
has apparently decided that since they can't effectively control
what's on the Internet (see their numerous attempts to retroactively
remove accurate information from web sites), they're now going to
start cutting themselves off from it. "Web-Filtering in Place,
Internet Cut-off From Enterprise" might now be the appropriate
headline.
The green Hermit Kingdom withdraws more and more from their
customers and the modern world. Of course, their employees
essentially all have Internet access at home, and now that
Enterprise has attempted to "ban" the site, I expect traffic to grow
even more. My dream come true would be for Enterprise to
publicly announce that employees are prohibited from coming here;
that's the traffic-generating home run I can only hope for.
I've been getting lots of requests from fans to offer
Failing Enterprise branded t-shirts. Unfortunately, we've had a
clear policy from the beginning that Failing Enterprise is purely
informational, and won't engage in trade or commerce in any way.
We're just speech here, not a business of any sort. Sorry.
Sunday, April 24th, 2005
It looks like Google has done another update. When
searching for "Enterprise
Rent-A-Car" we're now #4 of 859,000 listings. Narrow your
search to "Enterprise
Rent-A-Car reservation" and we're #1.
A search for "Enterprise
Rent-A-Car Customer Service" shows us as #4. Of course,
Enterprise itself is lower down, apparently because
Failing Enterprise now cares more about Enterprise Customer Service
than Enterprise does. If part of the public service that's
needed here at Failing Enterprise is providing the Internet's most
useful page of
Enterprise
Rent-A-Car Customer Service resources, then that's what we'll
do.
Using the
Overture Keyword Selector Tool to search for "Enterprise
Rent-A-Car", it's easy to see that the keywords "Enterprise
car rental" are by far the most popular. Accordingly, I've
now placed them as the hyperlink text in the footer of every page
(see for yourself at the bottom of this page). I want to make
it as easy as possible for potential customers to find out about
Failing Enterprise when searching for a rental car.
Unlike a certain 45-year-old corporate dinosaur that doesn't yet
understand the Internet, here at Failing Enterprise, we believe
giving customers more information is better than giving them less.
Friday, April 15th, 2005
The Economist is a
favorite weekly magazine here at Failing Enterprise. In a
current article there's a discussion about the recent results from a
yearly Bain & Company survey. In it, two-thirds of companies
responding say "insufficient customer insight" is hurting their
performance.
I've got your "insufficient customer insight" right here.
When a long-term customer's simple website about the horrific
treatment received at their branches continues to climb the charts
(traffic ranking on Alexa, PageRank on Google, etc.), and the
company continues to do nothing about it, I believe we've got a
prime example of insufficient customer insight as well as
insufficient attention to the problem.
Failing Enterprise gets 7,000 page views per day and
Enterprise Rent-A-Car still refuses to take even the first step to
correct these obvious problems. It looks like we're going to
have to just keep growing our traffic until the cacophony from their
customers, employees and partners gets so loud as to wake them from
their slumber. Do they even care that their customers and
employees are talking about them like this on the Internet?
What's it going to take to drag them, kicking and screaming, into
the Internet age, where customers, armed with the ability to raise
the alarm in the community of well-connected consumers, no longer
have to stand for this appalling disregard for customer
satisfaction?
Andy Taylor, CEO, be glad Enterprise is not a publicly-traded
company. If it were, investors might very well be baying for
your removal.
Wednesday, April 13th, 2005
I didn't think it was possible, but three new
Enterprise
Rent-A-Car Horror Stories have arrived at the Failing Enterprise
inbox over the past two days. Are we entering the summer
rental car customer abuse season? Some of these are really
appalling. I'm amazed they can stay in business doing what
they do. Side note: After reading about the problems at
the Folsom Street branch here in San Francisco, one of their very
senior executives said to me "I can't believe they can stay in
business". And this was about one of his own branches!
Don't they get sued on a regular basis? They must have
armies of lawyers doing nothing but defending them in court, and
armies of accountants telling them "Keep it up, because even with
our legal costs and losses, we still come out ahead on these".
Here at Failing Enterprise, we've not yet considered filing a
lawsuit, class-action or otherwise. We've been hoping that
with clear, honest talk they might come to their senses. We'll
just have to keep increasing our traffic and hope the message gets
to them one way or another. In the mean time, they just don't
"get it".
On another note, a friend of mine has a new
Nokia 9500
cell phone. It's fairly large, but it opens up (like
Val Kilmer's phone
in The Saint) and
has a built-in web browser. Check out this photo of us
browsing a certain well-known web site!
Meanwhile, it appears that people are getting comfortable with
the new discussion board software. Yesterday we had 95 new
posts and over 8,000 page views! Traffic just keeps growing.
Now that we've got multi-gigabit pipes to the Internet, we can grow
Failing Enterprise as big as it takes in order to get Enterprise to
take us seriously and fix these problems.
Also today I split this blog up into multiple pages, one for each
month. With all the entries, it started getting too long and I
wanted to break it up into smaller pieces and start using what
should be permanent file names for the pieces to aid search engines.
Lastly, at one point yesterday there were 33 people on the
discussion board simultaneously, a new record.
Monday, April 11th, 2005
I've been roaming around on Alexa
today, looking at web site popularity, and discovered a ranking of
Internet complaint sites. While there are a few sites that
aggregate complaints from many companies, of the sites that are
company-specific, it turns out we're
way up near
the top of the list! Only
PayPalSucks and
PayPalWarning are more
popular than Failing Enterprise, and PayPalWarning today doesn't even
have any content on it, so I'll assume it's soon to drop off the
listings.
Congratulations to Enterprise Rent-A-Car: Your complaint
site is more popular than every other complaint site for every
telephone company, cable TV company, Department of Motor Vehicles
and fly-by-night scam artist on earth.
Saturday, April 9th, 2005
Alexa is a site that measures
web traffic and provides popularity rankings. Our ranking has
been growing tremendously in the past few months and now I've added
a graph on our main page comparing our ranking with that of
enterprise.com.
If you want to help out, download and install their useful Alex
Toolbar and help them get accurate traffic information.
Sunday, April 3rd, 2005
I've updated the Discussion Board header (the items that
automatically appear at the top of every page) to better match the
header for the rest of the site. This is partially to ensure a
consistent look-and-feel across the site and partially to provide
some additional clues for search engines to index the site properly.
I've just requested Google send their crawlers by again to
explore the site and get updated information. We already rank
very high (on the first page for most searches), but I want to
ensure the best possible placement. A search right now for "Enterprise
Rent-A-Car" on Google shows there are 1,050,000 pages, of which
the first four are Enterprise itself, and we rank #7.
We're #7. We try harder.
I think we've got the Discussion Board configuration pretty much
dialed-in at this point, so the look-and-feel should remain more or
less stable going forward. However, since we're always looking
for ways to improve, please send your comments and requests to
comments2 ((at)) failingenterprise ((dot)) com.
Saturday, April 2nd, 2005
We've been at our new web host for a week now and everything
seems to be going just fine. We've averaged 6,000+ page
views per day for the past seven days. And it's not just
readers who seem to be happy; we've also been averaging 57 new
posts per day.
At one point last week, we had 31 people on the board
simultaneously! When I first created Failing Enterprise, I had
no idea it would become such a useful community resource.
More on Enterprise
car rental at the Failing Enterprise home page. |
