Antediluvian global systems not good enough any more

BY LANCE WIGGS

OPINION: This year I have rented cars from Budget Rent-a-Car in Auckland on 21 occasions, each of them a frustrating experience.

I started using Budget as Air New Zealand's website makes it easy to reserve cars during the ticket-purchase process, bypassing the universally poor rental car company online processes.

It's not just online.

Budget and its airport-based brethren also suffer from appalling checkout processes. They appear to be constrained to use global systems seemingly designed and built in the 1980s and simply unacceptable in today's world.

Each time I went to pick up a car I presented my credit card and driving licence, and either wrote down or said my street address and phone number.

Each time I also had to decline the excess insurance fee, for me an industry rort that is often overly aggressively sold.

Each time I looked across at the paper forms for Fast Break, forms that if filled out and processed would allow me to skip straight past the rigmarole and to the waiting vehicle.

Several months ago I actually filled out a form, and asked the person serving me to send it in. I received no response.

The websites for joining the clubs for the agencies - and I did check - were no help, with Budget's website, for example, requiring you to print out and manually fill in a form and then post it in.

Once that form arrives at Budget it is forwarded to the United States for processing, a process that takes weeks.

These are simply inexcusable business practices today, in an era of instant sign-ups and paper-free Powershop electricity retailing.

Each week I was bemused at the frustrating and lengthy experience, watching staff tap away furiously, print out indecipherable forms in duplicate on a dot matrix printer, mark up the paper with pen and ask me to sign in five places.

Yet while it's an industry with practices mired in the past, we cannot blame the frontline staff, and nor, given the international ownership of the rental car companies, can we even blame the New Zealand operations.

The fixes seem easy. For example, Air New Zealand could capture, retain and pass through more of my information, and that printer could be replaced after the form is redesigned.

Alternatively the front end of the Budget check system could be revamped, borrowing from, for example, Tourism Holdings, which has a simple self-check-in kiosk system for the company's cars and camper vans.

But the major fix, a worldwide revamping of the systems, is a seemingly impossible hurdle for these local firms. Control of those reservation systems is in the US (I assume) and they have legacy issues that abound.

While it is sad just how appalling the rental car systems and processes are, my heart goes out to the staff who have to cope with those systems while trying to deliver great service.

But last week everything changed, and it took just one person - the boss.

My reservation was dealt with instantly, the call for extra insurance was muted and the issue of my repeat business was known.

The area manager, as it turned out she was, offered to sort out my Fast Break application - after all she had all of the required information on the five times signed rental agreement in front of her.

I'm not sure whether she did this spontaneously, whether the staff had raised my case or whether her own work had detected a recurring customer. Perhaps, and I am not holding out hope, she had read one of my frustrated tweets, or had one passed to her.

Regardless, she took control in a minute. An email came to me later that day with a Fast Break number and the promise of a direct walk to the car in the future. I could tell my case was not alone: There was a spring in the step of all of the staff that day.

Sharryn Duncan, that area manager, made a difference - a big difference, in spite of her company's antediluvian systems and processes.

Indeed, it seems every business I come across has a few Sharryns, people who manage to get things done, no matter how many barriers are thrown in their way.

The key is to identify these people, to make sure they are given what they need, but above all to help them lift other staff to their level.

Imagine how great Budget and the other agencies would be if every employee was like Sharryn.

Lance Wiggs is a consultant to industrial, media and internet-based businesses. He is a director of several companies and a regular blogger on his website lancewiggs.com

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