Technology to the Rescue

This last weekend I rented a truck to drive back stuff (ok junk - no really some of it is nice) from my Mom's house which we just sold. I had a "great" customer service experience which makes me wonder why technology isn't being better used in 2009. Here is the story:

I ordered a truck from U-Haul with a week to spare. No problem right. Well U-Haul called to confirm the day before and said I had to drive an hour and a half to pick up my truck. I didn't like this answer - they had a week of notice to arrange their trucks, but I guess having customers drive long distances is much cheaper for them. So I called around to find a better location. I finally found Penske based on my sisters recommendation that had a truck 5 minutes down the road available the next morning. Great I was all set.

The next morning I drove to the truck rental location (not owned by Penske - a used car lot that rents trucks on the side). The person who is authorized by Penske to sell trucks wasn't there and there was no truck. I called Penske and said what is going on...after 20 minutes on hold I finally got a person who started looking into my problem. After 2 hours of searching for a truck (I never got a good answer as to what happened to my truck) and many conversations they finally found one somewhat close and available the next day (when I was planning on moving anyway).

It all worked out, I got the truck moved and got everything from my Mom's safely.

This really got me thinking ... why aren't the technology systems of these companies better? Why cannot they predict with better accuracy where a truck will be and why does it take someone two hours of calling each office to find out which have trucks and which are open on Sunday? Couldn't a simple (ok maybe not that simple, but these are big organizations with big IT budgets) database handle all this information and make looking this information up take 2 minutes instead of 2 hours? What is the cost of all of the employees spending 2 hours on the phone - let alone the cost of the customer aggravation and discounts (they did give me 50% off my truck rental rate for the hassle).

Technology is changing society, but even in 2009 it has a long way to go to really revolutionize every industry. It is coming though and coming faster than we all think.