I’ll apologize in advance for not posting sooner, but things have been crazy here at the beginning of the year.  Crazy in a good way and there are some fantastic projects in the work that will begin to be visible to the outside world very soon.

At risk of beating a dead horse, I’m going to continue on a rant which I hinted at in a previous post, but this time…I’m naming names.  Get ready.

I just returned from a week in London.  Forget what I was there for…highly confidential, at some point you’ll likely hear about that later.  But I took this opportunity to try a new airline.  You see, I’ve been a lifelong (and I mean that literally) loyalist to United Airlines and the Star Alliance.  And after this week, it appears that I will be returning to them with hat in hand.  Let me explain how things progressed.  I was traveling with a colleague…the very talented Brenton Webster.  He suggested that we take advantage of the time benefits (certainly not the price benefits) of flying the direct Seattle to Heathrow flight on British Airways.  They even have a special deal with Microsoft where for VERY few miles you can upgrade from Club World to First Class.  Well, issue number one…I’m not a member, so I promptly join their mileage program, which of course requires that I reserve a flight first.  Ah, but there is the issue, to get the upgrade you have to apply for it BEFORE you book the flight.  So I’m sort of stuck, forget that I have no miles in my account (I promptly transferred miles from hotel programs, which thankfully took only about a week…probably web services via the US Postal Service).  Brenton, being the saint that he is, decided to help me out with his miles and had numerous calls with British Airways supervisory staff, only to learn that they would NOT allow him to use his miles for my upgrade, very unlike Star Alliance.  We made a valiant effort at the airport and in the lounge to try again…nothing doing.

In mid travel, I tried again after my hotel points had transferred only to learn that it was out of reach, because as the agent on the phone put it, they don’t have access to the right systems.  Well, fast forward to the return trip and again, I was given the standard British Airways response which was starting to sound more and more like “piss off”.  And I had tried everything from candor to flirting to feigned ignorance...all to no avail

Why is this so hard for companies?  First, customer facing professionals not having access to proper permissions to service the customer is a persistent issue.  Too often they are told that they are unable to perform a task.  Why should the permission be tied to the task worker and not to the customer?  If the customer needs something done, the customer should be given control over not only their data, but the task, and allocate that permission to the agent.  Through customer identification, authorization and authentication, the customer service agent should be given ALL access to the data and tasks that the customer needs.  This points to issue number two, the single view of the customer.  By this I mean, the customer patterns, scoring, buying behavior, history, analysis, propensities and the hard data owned by that customer.  With the proper customer authentication the customer agent can perform reactively the actions dictated by the customer, but also be able to proactively suggest actions that will inevitably lead to customer retention.  Not to mention intelligent engines which can automate notifications, upgrades, discounts and promotions simply by combing the data and acting within certain parameters.  And last, the holistic view of the customer.  This means (and would have helped in my case) that the inter-enterprise data is also relevant to the customer experience with any company.  Someone spending large amounts with company A should not have to start at square one with their competitor company B.  Now, sharing this data may smack of breach of privacy, but in reality, most customers that value good service will volunteer this information, which can be verified in a number of ways.  So the customer service rep should be given the ability to capture this in a structured way that can feed into the customer intelligence engine.  A competitive advantage can be gleaned from HOW a company leverages this into a programmatic service practice.  In a service oriented world, this data should be available on request and portable to streamline the process.

But this escapes 99% of the consumer industry today, and probably most other industries.  And it all boils down to software usage.  Is the software available?  You bet it is, it lies in what we call business applications.  A dash of CRM, highly customized in a way that the big CRM firms fail to produce…a heavy dose of web services and event driven architecture…and a glazing of intelligent engines to empower the proactive and reactive service.  Sheer volumes of customers and companies competing for the same business require that these measures be taken.  The “mass affluent” demographic needs servicing and provides the volume and margin that the industry needs to turn bigger profit.  But that demographic requires MASSIVE overhaul of the ways in which they are treated. 

There is so much to be done.  There is so much depth to add to the way that consumers are treated in all walks of life.  And the technology is there for the building.  And that is my rant…as I sit here on my first and last British Airways flight over Iceland.  Long live the Star Alliance…I didn’t like sitting backwards on a plane anyway.