![]() ![]() After that experience, Kay said she’s done with Zipcar.Īnother COVID complication: keeping the cars clean. ![]() A Zipcar representative did secure a car for her for the second job, but it was much further away from her home. She had a hard time getting through to customer service, and ended up securing a ride with a Lyft driver instead. 1, but the car was missing when she showed up. She said she booked a Zipcar for a 24-hour shift, for two makeup jobs on Aug. She works for a health care nonprofit, but also is a makeup artist on the side. ![]() Joanne Kay, a San Francisco resident who doesn’t own a car, found this out the hard way. If there aren’t enough cars to go around, a few late cars can cause an unfortunate ripple effect. Zipcar rents cars out by the hour, but the company depends on members to return them to their parking spots on time or be fined. So, are members heading for the exit ramp? Zhen said Zipcar hasn’t seen a correlation between the customer service issues and cancellations yet. The hitches were essentially due to demand coming back so quickly, Zhen said, a problem she described as “very solvable.” She said she hoped customer service would be restored to its prepandemic levels later this month. The average wait time for customer service, a spokeswoman said, dropped by 45 percent in the past four weeks as a result. The company now has 10,000-plus cars on the street, including about 1,000 in the Boston area - more than it had before the pandemic. To address the situation, Zipcar increased its third-party customer service staffing by 70 percent and added more than 800 cars to its North American fleet. The company’s often-touted fleet management system fell short, leading to more missing cars and backups with customer service. For example, in New York City, demand rose 70 percent in June compared to the same month in 2019. Starting in mid-May, requests for cars came in at a much faster pace than Zipcar had expected. Meanwhile, a few rivals simply got out of the business. It was critical to keep going, she said, to support Zipcar’s members. The game plan: to take a conservative approach, to survive the pandemic. When COVID hit in March, Zhen said, Zipcar trimmed its fleet extensively, moving many cars out of expensive parking spots, as demand dropped amid widespread shutdowns. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |