Simple ways towards a better customer care

My experience with a leading car rental service last weekend triggered this post.

What happened? A booking for a 7-seater car was made for 8am. The car that was allocated to us at the parking lot had key issues(nonfunctional headlights, unadjustable rear-view mirrors) that made it unfit for use. We were left with no solution even after 2 hours of following up with customer care. We, finally, requested for cancellation of the booking and figured out alternative options.

Outcome: 6 people have decided never to use that brand to rent cars again.

Key problems:

1. The fundamental problem with the whole scenario was that the service being offered (in this case, the car) was not verified for quality.
2. During the initial few calls to the customer care, we were asked to wait for 15 minutes by when would hear back with a solution. However, we had to get back to the customer care every 20–25 minutes to understand the status.
3. Solutions offered did not seem to factor in the customer’s convenience or problem: As a first suggestion, for example, the customer was asked to take the car to a local mechanic to resolve this issue. After constant refusal to do this, we were asked if we could manage with a 5 seater. After we explained that it would be difficult for 6 people to take this recommendation, we were asked to go to another location to pick up a 7 seater. All while three other 7 seaters were available in the parking lot.
4. Inconsistent messages: During the course of a 10-minute conversation, the customer care person gave inconsistent messages about the status of a car (back-back booking, under maintenance, you can take it). This could have been due to lack of correct status being available to her or due to the pressure she felt during the conversation. Either way, it didn’t provide great comfort to the customers especially when a car under maintenance suddenly was ready to be rented out.

How could a strong customer care policy have made the experience better for the customer and the customer support personnel?

1. Remove the possibility of negative experience by ensuring a process to verify the service or product is fit for customer use.
2. Should an incident occur in spite of the preparedness, empowering the customer care personnel to decide on possible options and move things around would enable creative solutions and result in a happy customer and an engaged employee.
3. Strong customer-centric policy defined and shared with the team would help them live those ideas. Canned responses or solutions that is based on the company’s current limitations without factoring in the customer’s convenience (especially in a troubled scenario) wouldn’t work.

Please share any thoughts or suggestions you may have to improve the customer care in the comments sections below.