| Tuesday, October 30, 2007 |
11:13 - The Extra Mile
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I believe that from now on, when I'm in need of a rental car, I'll take my business to Enterprise.
Yesterday I was having a shop in Livermore work on the Lotus, welding in new catalytic converters so as to bring it perhaps one step closer to getting the damn thing smogged and registered. Livermore's a long way from home, and from work—far out of bum-a-ride range, anyway. So my only recourse was to rent a car. Because Enterprise is leading with their "We'll Pick You Up" service, I gave them a call, and they sent a guy out to pick me up at the shop; as we pulled out, the welding guys were already deep into the process of breaking the studs off the rusty turbos and giving me hunted glances from inside the warehouse/service bay. Soon afterwards, I was back at the Enterprise office, where with efficient and friendly service they bundled me into a PT Cruiser and sent me on my merry, three-speed-automatic-whirring way.
Come the end of the day, I gave the shop a call and confirmed that broken studs or no, the job was going to be done and I could pick up the car by closing time—6:00. I checked Enterprise's schedule. They too closed at 6:00. I was on the Peninsula, a good 45 minutes from Livermore, not counting the inevitable traffic jams. And it was 4:45.
I hopped in the Cruiser and headed across the bridge, then up 880. Traffic was reasonably light until the 580 exit, where everybody eastbound has to thread through a single-lane on-ramp and then a couple of miles of construction; yet even that didn't slow me down too much, and soon I was over the 580 summit and on my way down into Livermore. 5:40 and I was on the outskirts of town, with nothing ahead of me but lonely freeway all the way to Stockton. Plenty of time to get gas, turn in the car, phone the shop, confirm that the car was ready and I was coming, and pick it up.
...And that's when the traffic came to a dead standstill.
I should know better by now: freeways leading out of urban areas into the countryside are prime locations for chronic traffic jams, because they always lose lanes at inopportune times. 101 does that just north of Novato, closing down from three lanes to two, and invariably causing a fifteen-minute pileup of traffic on its way north into the expanse of Sonoma County. And 580 does it too, between Dublin and Livermore, where it loses two lanes. Just when I'd thought I was home free.
Crawling in traffic is at least better with an automatic than a heavy sporting clutch, though.
I exited the freeway at about 5:55, and knowing that I couldn't afford the time to stop and top off the tank, I screeched down the boulevard to the Enterprise office, which I reached at 6:01. Wedging the PT sideways into a space, I bounded up the steps, and found... that it was already dark and locked.
$%^#$%#.
I stomped around in the parking lot for a minute, to the side of the building, knowing that there was nothing I could do now but go home—even if I drove over to the shop, and even if they were still open, I'd find myself in Livermore with two cars, and I'd have to drive all the way back up here the next day or otherwise somehow work out the rental car return. I was tossing half-baked ideas around in my head like leaving the PT Cruiser in the shop parking lot and calling Enterprise to come get it themselves, however the paperwork and liability would work for that, when suddenly the manager, the captain of the Enterprise office appeared on the bridge leading from the lit side door down to my car.
"Oh, did you want to turn in your car?"
Into the office we went. Within a matter of two minutes the lights were all back on, the shop's website and Contact Info page were up, and I was on the phone with the shop confirming that I was only a few blocks away and would be there shortly. "Oh sure," they said. "We'll wait for you." Soon I was signed out.
Then all the rest of the Enterprise staff appeared, apparently from some offsite group function that had taken place at the end of the day. All was workplace chatter and socializing, and it caught them quite by surprise to find a straggling customer there behind the counter, after hours, standing there with a laptop bag and a Diet Coke looking all bedraggled from the rain. But they regained their composure immediately. They all sat down long enough to clock out of their computers, and then one of them shuttled me over to the shop in his personal car, on his way home.
All this was done with the utmost of courtesy and volunteered helpfulness. Never was there even the hint that they were going out of their way to help me out here, or that this was above and beyond the call of duty, or that I was imposing on their schedule or resources or company policy. It was all as though it was assumed this was what they'd do all along, if it came to it.
Long story short (too late), I found the shop still open, went inside where the employees were still manning counters and finishing up the day's jobs, and paid and signed my car out, and was home with a car that no longer smells like a fuel spill in time for dinner. (It's now firing yet another O2 sensor code, but I'll figure that out at my leisure.)
The bottom line is that Enterprise could easily have simply said "We're closed", and I'd have been in a world of annoyance for the following day. Best business practices probably would have dictated them to do exactly that. But instead, when the manager asked me offhand while finishing out the paperwork whether they had provided a satisfactory level of service and would say as much when Enterprise called me later with the inevitable customer experience survey, I said, "If there was another star I could add at the end, I would."
And that's smart business.
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Brian Tiemann
