During the first day of the crises VoiceSage was up and running with pro-active notifications to stranded American Airline customers within four hours. This is from “no relationship” to full interaction with their client base. There was no integration project, it was “loosely coupled, tightly integrated” in conception. American Airlines could have adapted, augmented, extended the messaging and interaction intent at any time, in real time. No, its not the full journey, but its a long way down the road.

Feelings of Abandonment

As the world becomes more and more interconnected the speed with which companies and individuals have to react to events changes. The ashcloud event left hundreds of thousands of people stranded, away from home, away from family. I was stranded comfortably at home but I was due to go to eComm in San Francisco. Many companies have a hard enough time living up to the demands of customers in times of ‘business as usual.’  Yet I am betting that people end up talking to others about the companies that responded “exceptionally well”, that were “just awesome’, that “totally made me feel I was going to be looked after, eventually”.

You see, the customers biggest fear was that they were going to be abandoned. The amount of frustration that people experienced on not being able to reach a call center was palpable. I tried myself. Tried to log onto my airline site as well to check the status of MY flight. No luck. Worse than no luck, no screens at all. Eventually I found the various airports on twitter and followed them for updates. I followed most of the e-vent on twitter after that. A brief check in this morning with the various airlines and airport twitter profiles shows them very active. I suspect that for many people this event has turned them onto social media for “practical purposes”.

Ashcloud Sparks Social Media Continuity Response?

Dan Levy at Sparksheet.com has an interesting survey of the Post Ash Airline Customer Care landscape.

(1) Inform: Not just what is the flight status, but how to rebook (add link?), what might be around your specific location that might be of help, provide links to more specific content. Airlines could have gone a step further and understood that the customer really needed help with their extended network of relationships. Who was waiting for them? Had they rented cars? How will delays affect their extended journey?

(2) Reassure: Examples given by Dan Levy include giving people hope by tweeting that some other people were getting flights, or had found hotels, etc. Standard positive reinforcement. But I think there was also the opportunity to let people see that you are ramping up as an organization, that you are getting on top of it, that your agents had now “rebooked 25% of all passengers” etc.

(3) Engage: Employees of the company engaged directly with passengers by replying to their twitter messages, or in such media as the company’s Facebook page. Passengers then shared the information they were given with others. An employee might have posted a link to Transport maps for Dublin for one stranded passenger, only to find that this passenger was now sharing and spreading this information in multiple social sites, and on the ground.

Enacting A Social Contact Strategy

Mark Tamis in a conversation elsewhere a few weeks ago, reminded me that to reap the rewards of a well defined and managed Social Strategy you need to have a Data Strategy, and Data Analytics capability.

There is indeed lots of information out there that could be made available at the right time, and right place. But there is usually data within the company itself that is a good predictor of customer behavior. Mark gives an example of where companies send out a win-back call when a customer terminates an account.  If they have high variability in their bill, or there are other standard preconditions to someone leaving the company, call them before they leave! (duh). In this Ashcloud instance the company might have used its data analytics capability to communicate with high value customers, or customers with more than 2 children, or with children under the age of 5. The company may have chosen to give first offers on Hotel bookings in a way that maximized customer lifetime value.

Meta Strategy: from Real Time to Right Time?

David Pakman seems to have initiated a discussion about the various merits of real-time versus right-time.

The Ashcloud customer service crises exemplifies how real time access to everything isn’t always useful. What we the customer want is the real-useful information at the right time. What would have been useful? Well if I was stranded in Dublin airport and my flights were not going to happen, I would have liked a proactive message from my airline alerting me to this fact as soon as possible, and giving me the option to connect to a local hotel to book a room ASAP. I would like the airline to tell me that they were able to get me this offer now because they used their existing relationship with this hotel to free up as many rooms as possible. I would like to be able to hear what the next bus time is, or to be told where the taxi’s to the city center are. I might even want to be inform my credit card company that I am in another country overnight and to honor my credit card requests.

Culture of Right Person, Right Time

Lior Arussy on mycustomer.com has a very human response to the logistical nightmare. Things to praise: smiles, friendliness, hotels that check how are you doing, will you need to stay another night? We’re not going to charge you excessively for that by the way, come talk to us. The system hasn’t got you booked in? Let me do what I can to fix that for you…. This is what people will remember. I have heard that in Lanzarote the hotels actually reduced the price of an additional night if you were stranded, and gave you vouchers for half price meals in town. The opposite seems to have happened in Amsterdam. Which location has the culture that you want to experience as a holiday destination?

Somehow these people “shared your experience”, and not with a knowing nod, but with real concern and actions that demonstrated that they were “going beyond the machine” to help you. What you were “feeling” is that you have been touched by the culture and values of the people that make up that company.  That you were being cared for.

Outcomes- Power of Pull Networks?

An airline that shuts off its website and has a call center you can’t get through to is displaying the signs of being overwhelmed. The structures, the systems, the people could not scale or adapt to the new situation.  The airlines that had the capability of pulling together many different resources, companies and people to get “the job done”, had a 21st Century Network, or “Pull” capability.

Those airlines that were able to reach out, at the right time, and right place, to give the right information, and make the right connections, for an extended context, were part of a pull network. They were co-ordinating and orchestrating processes using real time information. I think this lesson will be extended to other contexts and other industries really soon. The power of networked organisations; the power of culture; the power of enabled employees and enabled customers; the power of pulling information and actions together quickly “at the edge”; I think we’ve all learned a lot from this crises.