Are Avis still trying harder?

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I know that I’m a difficult customer, and I know that I don’t always give my own customers the service they deserve, but my experience in the last week of Avis, the car hire company, has been a sad reminder that advertising promises are not always delivered.

I am of the generation that remembers the famous ‘We’re number two, so we try harder’ campaign produced by DDB in the 1960s when Avis’s Chief Executive was a brilliant leader called Robert Townsend who wrote one of the best books on management ever, called ‘Up the Organisation’.

Renting a car from Avis at Cork Airport last week, I noted that they still have a ‘We try harder’ badge attached to their logo, but at the end of my renting experience I am left thinking that if Avis are trying harder to do anything at the moment, it is to make more money rather than serve their customers.

If you are still with me gentle reader, my gripe is as follows.

A helpful sign on the Avis desk in Cork Airport had told me when I rented the car, ‘Drop your key back here’.

Thinking to myself, “Ah! That’s a good simple system, I’ll do that,” two days later I returned the excellent Ford Focus which I had hired at the agreed time, parked it in the agreed place, having filled it up with the agreed diesel fuel………but unfortunately forgot to drop the key into the box and flew back with it to London.

The next day I called Avis and explained my plight. The bottom line was that they said they only had one spare key and couldn’t hire that car out again to anyone until I returned my car key. By now it was Friday morning and a courier company very helpfully offered to return the key for £300. The Royal Mail, rather more helpfully, offered to return it and track it for £6.20.

“But surely you must have more than one spare key”, I said desperately to the person at the Avis desk. “Oh no”, she said, “the dealer only gives us two”. “But you’re the second largest car hire company in the world”, I said. But the supervisor rang me back and said that they would have to keep charging until the key was returned.

With an open tab running on a car that I was renting but couldn’t use because I was in London and it was in Cork, I was getting a bit sweaty. I rang my bank. Could I cancel the transaction on my bank card? No, not unless I wished to cancel the whole card and get a new one….

Because it was Friday and the week-end was looming, the earliest that the Royal Mail could get the key there was likely to be Monday afternoon, and in the end they achieved exactly that – so they come out of the story with credit – but Avis resolutely charged me for three days extra car hire – 155 Euros. By now I had spoken again to the supervisor who told me that she was being quite generous for only charging me for three days!

I know this was my fault. I know that I had a decidedly senior moment. But I would like Avis to know that I’m deeply pissed off and I have just chosen another car hire company when on holiday in France next week.

Bill Bernbach who presented the “We try harder” ad to Robert Townsend also said that good advertising will make a bad product fail faster, and as Avis have been trading successfully for the past 50 years they must have had a lot of happy customers in that time.

But I’m not one of them.

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Posted: July 29th, 2010 | Author: will.armstrong | Filed under: Market Leader, Notes from the CEO, leadership | Tags: , , , | Leave a Comment »

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