Discovering learning opportunities in the most unexpected ways.

I’m always amazed at how life can bring to us learning opportunities in the most unexpected ways.

Earlier this year my family went on a road trip to Spain. This was a long-overdue time that we intended to spend recovering and healing after a loss of our dear family member, my wife’s third round of beating cancer and us spending very little time as a family due to work prioritization. Our hearts were jumping with joy like mad bunnies just at the reminder of this vacation.

We rented a car from Hertz – one of the most trusted and reliable car rental agencies globally. However, I made a mistake unforgivable for a minted risk professional – used trust in a company as a control in our risk mitigation strategy. And boy was I wrong.

We were very happy with the polite and knowledgeable attitude of Hertz staff at the pickup location and totally enjoyed the first week of the trip. And then our operational risk nightmare started.

Due to our rental vehicle having not been serviced, we had to urgently exchange it for a working vehicle. We found a Hertz rental location off our planned route and exchanged the vehicle to a lower class one, as our purchased class was not available at that location. On the day of the exchange, an hour or so into our ride, the second rental vehicle also demanded maintenance. We started nervously laughing almost expecting that the third one would have issues as well. This was starting to remind of a comedy of errors.

Again, we changed our travel plans and returned to the original rental location for the  exchange. By now we had lost about 1.5 days staying off our planned route. As you can imagine, this was really impacting our relaxed and happy mood.

On our way to exchange the vehicle, we stopped by a large shopping centre close to Barcelona. What the heck, we thought, if we have to change our plans, let’s at least do something useful, stop at a shopping centre and be done with our shopping in Spain till the end of the trip.

This was another rookie operational risk mistake. I should have taken the available data for high theft rates in/around Barcelona, added a broad range of uncertainty associated with the unknown incidence of theft from rental cars, assign normal distribution, run 10,000 Monte Carlo iterations and then make a risk-informed decision based on the generated histogram. However, we were on a trip and my risk manger mode was totally off.

At the mall’s parking lot, the window of our vehicle was broken, and a lot of valuable things were stolen. Thieves were definitely happy at such a surprisingly good loot. At the same time, our daughter surprised us – initially she started crying. She felt confused and scared that the safety of our car, our family’s safety and personal space was so rudely violated. However, once we discovered that her plush bear-bear – her most treasured possession, had not been stolen, she switched to a different mode. She became very supportive and caring turning from an 8-year old to 28-year old. As we drove to the police station and spend 3 hours destroying the walls of cross-border communication and filing a police report, our daughter continuously exhibited a very clear case of operational resilience.

This incident elevated our level of stress even more. What was really interesting though, that at the Hertz counter we were told that rental vehicle robberies are common due the presence of a Hertz sticker on the windshield. Surprise-surprise, it’s a well-known fact, at least internally. And my motto as a risk manager – no negative surprises – was totally annihilated.

We received our third rental car and went on our way after loosing a lot of precious time and possessions. The rest of the trip was not stressful, and we were able to relax and recover after Hertz problems and the robbery.

However, this was not the end of the Hertz saga. As we returned the car and were ready to enjoy the rest of our stay in Barcelona on foot, we noticed that Hertz charged us for the additional driver, which they were not supposed to do. Additionally, they charged the credit card they swore not to charge at the beginning of the rental and that was provided solely for security purposes. By charging the remainder of the rental amount on the wrong card, Hertz de facto voided our Visa car rental insurance. And this happened when we had just breathed a sigh of relief that no more car troubles would befall us.

To get the situation corrected, we spent around 1.5 months writing to Hertz executives via LinkedIn and communicating with Hertz Executive Customer Care. The lack of care and communication style exhibited by this department deserves its own novella, but I’ll be brief here to save some space. Executive Customer Care Specialists:

-            Did not care to do due diligence, review our profile and see that we were loyalty program members who were supposed to get a free second driver, as was promised at the beginning of the rental;

-            Did not understand a simple request to correct the situation, refund the wrongly charged card and charge the correct card. We had to re-write the request three times and engage a linguist to simplify text enough (e.g., substitute “refund” with “return the money”) for the proper transaction to happen;

-            Treated refund for the additional driver as a compensation for all our troubles with the vehicle exchange and voiding the insurance – “181.50€ already processed is more than fair regarding incident that took place and no further compensation is warranted.” This basically said that Hertz erroneously voiding our insurance was ok, would not be corrected and that we were not to bug them again with such trifles – “Repetitive, frequent emails to our Executive and senior leadership team will not change our resolution. Please consider this our final response on the matter. No further inquiries will be responded to as we consider it having been fully addressed.”

Our overall experience with the Executive Customer Care Team was exactly opposite of what they claim to do – “The Hertz Executive team does it’s best to ensure all inquiries/concerns are thoroughly reviewed and researched for an accurate outcome”. I’m just wondering: if this is the crème-de-la-crème, what kind of treatment regular customers get…

And by the way there was no mention or any apologies re the need to change vehicles twice due to Hertz negligence. This is why moving forward I am treating this is the normal and expected outcome of Hertz customer satisfaction assurance – mandate a variety of vehicles to experience from the expansive Hertz fleet. I am being facetious here.

Now as we are looking back at the whole Hertz situation, we feel kind of proud - how many travellers can boast such a diverse and adventure-filled vacation as our family. But at the same time, setting emotions aside and looking at this experience from the operational risk lens, I would single out unmitigated/poorly mitigated and known operational risks as opportunities for improvement:

-            Risk of customer litigation due to the fact that Hertz omits notifying their clients about a higher likelihood of theft from rental cars:

o   This will most likely not reduce the incidence of theft but at least renters will be warned. Think about this as a checkmark in your compliance program.

-            Damage to physical assets and increased operating costs due to untimely vehicle fleet maintenance:

o   This risk is fully preventable with some additional controls and oversight put in place.

-            Additional financial pressure on the bottom line from failures in process execution and inadequate staff training/supervision:

o   Additional funds on training, spot checks on customer complaint treatment and careful consideration and response to customer complaints that are justified will do the trick.

-            Customer dissatisfaction and reputational damage due to a compounded impact of all these risks coming together:

o   Well, this one is much harder to manage – stuff happens. But with some care and customer journey and risk mapping, this risk can be significantly brought down.

Our family has also acquired several valuable travel-related operational risk learnings from this event-packed family vacation:

-            Be ready for a certain amount of execution, delivery and process management risks from service providers;

-            Expect that some companies’ business practices and staff training will not meet generally accepted customer service principles;

-            Always remember that at the cornerstone of our vacation risk mitigation lies the following governing principle: despite any vacation disruptions we are in this together as a family, and together we can support each other in the most uncomfortable and unexpected situations.