When Fixing the Problem is Not Enough
A personal crisis shows why communication is so crucial in the sharing economy.
by Vivek Shah
Given the parking situation in San Francisco, leaving town for a few days involves careful planning—especially if you own a car. Earlier this year, I discovered an alternative to paying tens or hundreds of dollar for long term parking, in the form of a novel service called FlightCar.
The young company offers a free place to leave your car, then rents it out to visitors while you’re away, for less than what a rental company would charge. You get a ride to the airport, your car gets washed and vacuumed, and FlightCar shares a fraction of the rental proceeds. Like any other company in the sharing economy, FlightCar works on trust (there are legal agreements in place, but who reads those?). So when my most recent experience with them went terribly awry, it strained that trust in a way I’d never experienced. It also exposed a serious difference between how sharing services must handle mishaps, and how everyone else does.
It’s already been an eventful summer for me. I left San Francisco for India on May 10, to visit family for a few weeks before starting a summer internship. I had already used FlightCar once before, and trusted them with my car, so the entire pre-flight was blissfully stress-free: I handed over the keys to my 2007 Corolla, then stepped into a town car which took me to the terminal.
Fast forward to three weeks later, as I pulled into the lot to pick up my car. Seeing only one Corolla, six years newer than mine, I began to sense a rising panic. The friendly attendant calmly explained that the man who rented the car hadn’t returned it when his reservation ended. That was two weeks ago, and no, a police report has not been filed. My external calmness at the moment was probably due to a combination of post-flight exhaustion and a certain faith in FlightCar’s ability to set everything right.
I’d been counting on driving to Portland a day and a half later, and suddenly had no idea whether that would now be possible. To their credit, FlightCar issued me a loaner car for the remainder of my time in San Francisco, but did very little else to relieve my building anxiety. No clear explanation or next steps, no “Don’t worry, we’ll get you where you need to be in time,” and no assurance that a police report had been filed until after repeated emails from my side. Why hadn’t they told me while I was away? What condition was my car in? Was I liable for damages? Was I expected to do something, or just wait for them to take care of things?
As it turned out, my car eventually showed up, three and a half weeks after the return date. I’d made my own arrangements to fly to Portland, FlightCar compensated me a little bit for the inconvenience, and assured me the car will be in the same condition I left it when I return. Our relationship, though, has permanently changed, not because they didn’t do enough to fix the problem, but because of how they communicated as they were doing so.
FlightCar, like most businesses in the sharing economy, is sustained by trust. It isn’t enough for them to simply right a wrong; clear communication is equally important to make a customer feel valued and heard, and their needs considered. As one of the longest-established and most successful sharing services, Airbnb has set a benchmark for handling these sorts of unfortunate incidents, by demonstrating their ability to move quickly in such situations, and maintaining open communications throughout. This makes the act of giving house keys to a stranger a surprisingly worry-free experience.
I also believe that FlightCar is doing what they can, with the resources they have. All of these services, though, need to acknowledge that they’re also part of an intangible and highly sensitive parallel economy that trades in trust, not money. Working to preserve this trust, through words, design and actions, is what will decide the winners and the losers in the sharing economy. It will also decide its future, as more and more of the mainstream considers the possibility of opening their resources to friendly, trusted, yet unknown people.
Despite my experience, I’m still a proponent of the sharing economy because for me the benefits outweigh the risks, and I believe it’s a more responsible approach to forming a society. As a Millennial living in the Bay Area, I’m also genuinely excited to see technology facilitate connections which have been eroding through urbanization, giving us some of what we had when we still knew our neighbors by name. Coming from a society that takes the sharing of goods and resources for granted, I’m inclined to view these kinds of services favorably. And as a designer, I tend to see these kinds of missteps not as inherent issues of the sharing economy, but as design problems to be solved. This makes me optimistic, not exasperated. And even though experiences like the one I had with FlightCar are rare, designing for them is perhaps the most important thing a company can do to keep trust intact.
Vivek Shah is an Interaction Design student at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, currently interning for the summer at Ziba Design in Portland. He embraces the technology driven sharing economy boom, and hopes to help shape the future of collaborative consumption. Follow him on Twitter at @ThisisMrIndia
