When tech-enabled process automation goes awry

Hertz overcharged me by six hundred dollars, and here is how it happened. I have been traveling for business since 1985, and I log about a…

Hertz overcharged me by six hundred dollars, and here is how it happened. I have been traveling for business since 1985, and I log about a hundred thousand miles a year, almost exclusively domestic travel within the continental United States. Travel has gotten so much more comfortable in the thirty-four years that I have been doing it. I won’t bother listing all of the improvements, as most of them are not relevant to this conversation. Instead, I am going to focus on a single aspect of my travel, the Hertz car rental process. First off, I’ll admit that I don’t rent cars all that much anymore. I use Uber more often than I rent cars — because it is simpler, cheaper, and more reliable. However, between 1985 and 2015, I rented somewhere around thirty vehicles a year — almost all of them from Hertz. Conservatively speaking, I have rented around 900 cars in thirty years. Over these years, Hertz has introduced lots of features to make the rental process easier for me, the customer, along with features that make things easier for them, the vendor.

In the bad old days, the return process was a nightmare of inefficiency. When you pulled into the return lot, you had to grab the printed rental agreement and the Hertz envelope from wherever you left it in the car. You wrote the rental agreement number on the envelope and then wrote down the date and time, the mileage and the fuel level. Next, you grabbed your bags and trundled off to the returns counter and waited in line to hand in your paperwork and get a receipt. The whole process was people-intensive and created all sorts of I’m-going-to-miss-my-flight angst if the return line was long.

Hertz improved this process by giving you the option of dropping the Hertz envelope and rental documents into a mail slot outside of the returns building. This updated process was faster because it eliminated the need to stand in line at the returns counter. The new method was quicker than waiting in a line, but it was less reliable because we were living in a world without ubiquitous email. You never knew if the return got processed for the correct amount until you got your credit card statement or the copy of the receipt that Hertz would mail out to your billing address.

Hertz improved this process again by installing “return” kiosks just outside of the returns building to replace the mail slots. You still had to write everything down on the return envelope and carry it back with you to the returns building. Once you got to the kiosk, though, it was a simple matter to plug in your rental details into the kiosk interface and get a copy of your receipt printed out for you right there and then. It wasn’t faster than dropping the envelope in the mail slot, but you got the satisfaction of getting a receipt right on the spot. (This also meant that you could fill out your corporate expense report form without needing to wait for the receipt to arrive in the mail).

Next up, Hertz added, “Gold Returns” to speed up the process even more. You pulled your rental car into the return lane, and a Hertz employee with a wireless pad and a holster-mounted printer would take down all of the return information and print you out a receipt on the spot. Gold returns was an improvement on the kiosk approach for two reasons. First, you did not have to write down the date and time, mileage, or fuel level — the Hertz return specialist did all of that for you (while you were gathering up your belongings). Second, Hertz could add staff to handle busy periods, which wasn’t an option with the kiosk approach. Over time, Hertz allowed you to leave your car in the returns lane without having to wait for the “returns” specialist to close out your rental. You could safely head to the departure terminal and expect to get an email copy of your receipt before you made it through security.

Over the past several years, Hertz has made some slight tweaks to this process — mostly around eliminating the “returns” specialists. When you return a Hertz car, they give you the option of driving into a returns “express” lane. There are no returns specialists in the express return lanes. You leave the car in the returns lane and head to the departures terminal and get a return receipt via email by the next day or two.

I’ve never had a problem with this latest returns process … until a month ago.

I rented a car in Denver for a week. My return flight left early in the morning, so I elected to stay at the Westin hotel right inside Denver’s airport the night before I was scheduled to fly out. I dropped my luggage with the valet at the Westin and then returned the Hertz car using the “express returns” lane. The trip wasn’t a business trip, so I was not concerned with getting a copy of the return receipt right away. My Hertz account uses my private email address, which tends to get more junk email than my work email account, and I don’t pay close attention to it.

A week later, I am sitting at the airport waiting to head out on a flight, and I start going through my private emails. There, right at the top, is a copy of the Hertz receipt, which I open to verify that the charges were correct. And what do my tired eyes see? A receipt for TWO WEEKS instead of a single week. The Hertz email was at the top of the queue because the car had only just been logged as “returned” and the receipt went out right away.

I had time, so I called the Hertz customer service number. I had recently finished Malcolm Gladwell’s “Talking to Strangers.” In the book, he talks a fair bit about the idea that people “default to truth” and assume that other people are honest. The customer service rep on the Hertz line had NOT read Gladwell’s book. The entire tone of our conversation was adversarial. I went into the call, assuming that it would be a fast conversation to clear up the problem and adjust my bill.

Boy-oh-boy, was I wrong. After hearing my story and clicking around on the keyboard in the background, the customer service rep told me that they could not adjust my bill and that they would have to talk to the store manager at the Denver Airport location. I asked if I could have the contact information for the store manager, and they told me that they do not give out that information. They were also vague as to when they would be reaching out to the Denver location, so I told them “thanks for nothing” and decided to contact the central customer service center myself.

I had to gather up all sorts of documentation before I sent the email to customer service. I needed a copy of the rental receipt, a copy of my flight itinerary showing my early morning departure scheduled for the day AFTER I returned the car and a copy of the hotel receipt. I emailed a description of the problem and all of my evidence to the central customer service mailbox and waited. Two weeks later, I finally heard back from Hertz that they were refunding me the money for the extra week of charges. (I never heard anything back from the phone call with customer service — even though they had assured me that they would call me back.)

All of this preamble is just a digression from the point of this post. When automation works, it can be transformative. I love just dropping my car off in the Hertz parking lot and skipping the line. It’s not going to save me days and days of my life, but it makes the rental car process just a little easier. There were plenty of times that I stood around for twenty minutes just waiting for a Gold Return agent to work their way down the aisle of cars to get to me. (This was a particular problem at San Francisco airport for early morning flights back east).

When things go wrong, however, automation is a mess. First off, there aren’t enough real people available to help you. And the failure erodes your trust in using the system altogether. The system did not self-correct; I manually intervened to get my charges reversed. The not-so-helpful people on the customer service line default to the position that the CUSTOMER is wrong, and put the burden right back on you. Weirdly, this makes sense since the automated system always works, right? Wrong. At the root of things, this is a failure of software and systems, not a failure of people. (Well, except for maybe the people that wrote some of the code ;)

Highly automated systems need exceptional error handling, logging, and problem correction facilities. It’s critical for tech-savvy users, but it’s even more essential for non-technical customers using these highly automated systems. Errors are unavoidable, but intelligent error-correction facilities provide a critical backstop. In my example case, I suspect that someone on the Hertz lot failed to check my return into the system. All Hertz rental agreements have a unique rental number, and all Hertz cars have a unique bar code. So, even if check-in representative on the lot could not locate my rental documents (which I left on the dashboard) — they would have been able to identify the car.

My theory is that my rental never got checked in; they just cleaned it and moved it to the storage area. The next time that the car got rented triggered it to be “returned” from my rental — a week after I had returned the vehicle to Hertz. In an ordinary world, it is highly unlikely that a Hertz parking lot clerk would fail to record the return of a car. It’s also unlikely that any single Hertz car would go unrented for any significant period. In my case, both events happened in tandem, causing the problem. This situation is what software people often like to call an “edge case.”

But is this an edge case? According to Wikipedia, an edge case “… is a problem or situation that occurs only at an extreme (maximum or minimum) operating parameter.” I followed Hertz’s rules for returning the car. I parked in the designated automatic returns lane as directed by a Hertz employee standing right there on the Hertz parking lot. I was within the “operating parameters,” so this can’t be an edge case.

It’s a failure in the core processing of the system. As software developers, this is the kind of problem that is so bedeviling to users and contributes to dissatisfaction with automation. The system failed, I was over-charged, customer service was unable to help, so I was forced to gather all of the data myself and present my case to the black hole of a faceless email address; cross my fingers and hope for the best. And I’m in the technology business — think how frustrating that this would be for a customer lacking in technical skills needed to submit evidence back to Hertz and lacking sufficient funds to carry an extra $600.00 in credit card charges for a month. (Sure, even at a 19% APR the interest on $600 for a month is only $9.36 — but you are paying for THEIR mistake).

Hertz has the intended return date as part of the rental, and they also have your email address and phone number. If the car is overdue for a day or so, they could contact you via email, text, or telephone. Instead, I GOT A LETTER IN THE POSTAL MAIL A WEEK AFTER THE RENTAL WAS OVERDUE. Seriously.

As developers, we have to do much better as regards error handling and logging. If we want to increase automation to reduce costs, we also need to ensure that automation increases customer satisfaction. Errors happen in complex systems, and there is no avoiding it. It’s our responsibility as developers to improve our error handling and make the customer’s experience as seamless as possible. What’s the solution? Log everything, leverage intelligent error-handling, and over-communicate with the customer. It sounds simple, but as software developers, we often leave logging and error handling until the very end.

In the meantime, I’ll be avoiding the Hertz un-attended returns lane for awhile.