On the Receiving End
I’ve debated at length to the extent of which I’m willing to include my personal life here, and I’ve not made any conclusions. That said, I’ve just had a hellacious experience dealing with U-Haul, and I felt it was worth including a copy of the note I sent them:
To say that my experiences with U-Haul have been negative fail to fully describe the nature of my ordeal. The problems with the rental began before my arrival on the scene, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll stick with the problems relevant to me, which began after I became involved.
A friend of mine rented a moving truck with which to conduct a 1-way move across the state of Texas and due to complications involving his drivers’ license (read: “crap… my drivers’ license expires today so they won’t let me drive”), it became necessary that someone else drive the truck, and I volunteered (read: “I was the only schmuck along who had a valid drivers’ license). At the time, I was asked for my driver’s license and a secondary form of identification, for which I used my MasterCard. At that point in time, I made sure to ask the man at the desk two or three times if my credit card would be charged under any circumstances and I was assured repeatedly that under no circumstances would my card be charged. (Seriously, this guy didn’t look like much of a winner in the ‘Brains’ Department, so I kept asking to pound this point in… apparently, it didn’t take.)
Of course, as would be necessitated by my irritation, my credit card was charged. As soon as I received my credit card statement and noticed the errant charge, I called the independent dealer where the rental was started and the lady with whom I spoke was pleasantly helpful. I was promised a call for the next day by the manager, which I received first thing in the morning after he had researched my case. He apologized and told me that my name was not, in fact, listed as the driver and that somehow my credit card had simply been amended to the file due to an employee mistake. In fact, he even confessed that had I been pulled over, I would have been in some trouble in that my name was not anywhere on the paperwork. He also noted that he was sadly unable to resolve the issue in-store and would be forced to escalate me to the corporate offices. (Note: he would be the second and last intelligent employee with whom I would speak. Also notable was that he and the first lady with whom I spoke actually had brains and customer service skills and didn’t work for U-Haul; the next 5 employees fit none of these criterion.)
Uhaul Corporate is worthless. Well, the receptionist is helpful enough, but the actual call-center failed to accomplish a single thing beyond wasting my time and exposing me to impressive lengths of heretofore unexperienced elevator-type hold music. I had to call on three separate occasions:
Call 1: Apparently unable to communicate with their rental offices, the call center required the same information I had given the rental office. After taking it all down, I was assured that I would be contacted within 48 hours.
Call 2: I called back 2 days later. The call lady made a particular point of stressing that I had to wait 48 hours, and after being informed that I had done so, her admission that she could do nothing for me seemed almost anti-climactic. After some pressing, she admitted that she could, in fact, file a complaint for me, but she claimed that there was nothing else that she could do for me.
Call 3: I carried the false hope that perhaps someone from U-Haul would call me, but 5 days later, I decided that I’d had enough with the waiting and called. This time, after pressing, I was told that I might be able to be helped and was transferred the relevant Uhaul Regional Office.
Unfortunately, after being transferred, the manager who was required in order to rectify things for me was not in and I was told that I would have to hope for a call back. The next day, I was pleasantly surprised that the manager from the regional office actually called back as promised. At this time, I found out that he was the one to whom my complaints were supposed to have been directed in the first place, complaints that he claimed to have never seen nor heard of until I left the message. I was inclined to believe him and gave my sad tale for the third time… I was inclined, that is, until after he got my information and went about his way, and became impossible to contact. For the next week.
In fact, after a week of trying to get ahold of him without so much as a peep, I finally decided to do what I should have done a week and a half earlier: call my credit card company and dispute the charge. Most notably, within 48 hours of my contacting my credit card company, I was informed that the issue had been resolved as opposed to the better than two weeks it took me dealing with your personnel. Oddly enough, your company has managed to attempt to turn me from a non-party into a customer and in so doing has made me loath to even associate with it, much less patronize it.
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