W6 Discussion Comments.

W6D1 Special treatment of customers based on knowledge

In the last few years both Southwest Airlines and Starbuck's have changed reward programs to measure dollars spent as opposed to miles flown or store visits.

Many airlines have already made good use of the data that they collect on customers. Good customer service for all customers is important. My personal comment is that if a company does not deliver good service, it does not matter how good their information systems and special offers are. Southwest Airlines has delivered good customer service to me and as a result I do pay attention to their personalized special offers. They limit what they send to me to deals that apply only to cities that I have specified.

One comment mentioned treating customer differently based on demographics. This can be useful such as sending "fly to Phoenix and check out retirement property" to people over age 55. However, it is important to avoid actions that could be seen as age or racial discrimination.

A suggestion was made to queue up a download specific videos for each passenger based on the passengers viewing preferences. How much personal information will you be willing to share? Do you want American Airlines to know every video you have ever watched so that they could make a good decision for you?

Data storage is now very inexpensive and businesses can afford to retain detail level data. If you are not certain what you are going to do with the data over the long term, that is an incentive to retain it all. In your "big data" homework, you used over 200,000 rows of yogurt data for a single store. I could have given you 150 million rows for many stores so that you could have looked for regional patterns.

W6D2 MyTwinn Customer Relationships

I have worked from home or on-the-road frequently over the last five years. I find I can do most of my client and Dominican work anywhere I can setup my laptop with a good internet connection. The main problem with this is that the "chance" encounters that would happen at work do not happen. For example, when I am at Dominican I will pass my colleagues in the hall and get good ideas. In an R&D lab chance meetings between scientists in different fields can yield important breakthroughs. Apple used to setup a tent in their parking lot each Friday and serve beer to cause chance meetings to occur. (I don't know if they still do this.)

One of the people I have worked with works in the office most of the time but stays home the first three days of each month when he has operational responsibility for a monthly reporting system. This allows him to be submitting and monitoring jobs 24 hours per day. He cut the elapsed processing time in half by working from home.

Work that is done at home should be objectively measured. If done correctly, these measures can apply both to "at work" and "at home" workers. Having good measurements of progress and work output make it easier to supervise people working from home. In my opinion, if you have a good way to monitor results, you do not need to work hard to manage and control behavior such as the exact number of hours worked each day.

This applies to managing people in the office as well. For example, you want to measure what a computer programmer is delivering to the project and not the exact hours of the day that the programmer is sitting behind his or her desk. It is easy to measure desk time. It is harder (but more useful) to measure delivery vs. schedule, conformance to programming standards, quality of work delivered, and how reliably the delivered programs perform.

Obviously the advantages of working at home vary by job and department. My wife's job as a nurse was to see patients in person. This is a job that cannot done from home.

One of you mentioned that you like to work in the office so that you can forget about work while at home. There are many jobs where this may not be possible. Google engineers are expected to solve problems. There are recreation areas at work so the engineer can give her/his mind a rest while in the workplace. A good engineer may well think of solutions while at home and may then test them out immediately.