Stephanie Fierman - Marketing Observations Grown Daily

What Happens If Stephanie Fierman In 26B Wants Something Else To Drink?

Tuesday March 24th 2009, 4:45 pm
Filed under: branding,cmo,customer service,loyalty marketing,market research

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about the knowledge management and CRM strategies that are filtering into the U.S. airline industry. Huzzah!

While I’m sure many airlines are experimenting, this particular piece features Alaska Airlines, where Steve Jarvis, the company’s head of sales and customer experience (and a man intensely focused on delighting high-value customers), talks about what they’re doing and learning along the way. Wordlessly delivering a frequent flyer’s favorite drink (in coach) “is not about the cocktail. The point is the recognition and thanks for your business.”

As a frequent flyer desperate just to be treated like a human being when I get to the airport, Steve Jarvis is my hero for recognizing that it’s good to be nice to people you need and actually doing something about it.

This will not be easy. The foundation of my entire career is customer segmentation and CRM. I know – in technicolor – how gigantic the technological and personal demands can be inside a company determined to change.

For starters, identifying even what customers do today – at every touchpoint – requires considerable data alignment. As with banks, airlines tend to have (a) outdated systems, that (b) don’t talk to one another. So whether a customer buys a ticket online (and when and for how much) is likely to be invisible to a gate agent. A phone representative most definitely does not know about the luggage problems you’ve had 2x this year already, and a customer service rep at the airport has no idea whether an email notification re. a cancelled flight was delivered to you or not. If this information exists, it typically sits in silos that either must be refitted or, sometimes, blown up entirely.

Second, the modeling capabilities needed to capture and place a quantifiable value on behavior – evolving usually into some kind of score that informs the type of service a customer receives – is imprecise at best and far more sophisticated in industries that have been at this for decades, like banks and credit card companies. The European airlines have a jump on us, though, and that’s good news for the learning curve.

Third, the really-really stripped down implication of all this work is that the value assigned to a customer will change the marketers’ human behavior. This is very hard – far beyond basic training and comp changes. In a crowded airport, you finally reach the counter, already yelling, and the agent is supposed to capture your name, “read” your score and follow the instruction that would be appropriate for a customer with that score. Good luck. It’s doable, but must be implemented with patience and empathy.

So if this is the direction in which the airlines realize they must head… fantastic! There are a lot of weazened but wise customer experience/CRM/segmentation veterans out here whom I’m sure would want to help. I, for one, will continue to watch for hints of progress, both on the plane and off.