W6 Discussion Comments

W6D1 Special treatment of customers based on knowledge

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 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.

You gave an example of American Airlines and Netflix sharing data about their mutual customers. Both businesses would need to examine their stated privacy policies to see if the policies allowed such sharing. Otherwise, policies would have to be changed and customers notified.

You mentioned that "airlines have to make their money somehow" and also discussed fees and charges that you did not like. My opinion is that airlines are charging for Wi-Fi, checked baggage and seat reservations is that we as customers are focused on the base fare and do not want to pay a higher base fare. I am willing to pay an extra $15.00 per person per flight in order to purchase "early boarding" on Southwest Airlines. Wi-fi is expensive for the airlines so, in my opinion, there will be an extra wi-fi charge for most passengers.

You noticed that American Airlines retains detailed data. 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.

You mentioned the possibility of airlines making marketing and discount arrangements with universities and discussed some methods for making sure passengers (students) were actually eligible for the discounts. My concern would be the added cost to the university to manage the relationships with the airlines and the logistics of operating the program. Would this extra cost cause a tuition increase?

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 served beer to cause chance meetings to occur. (I don't know if they still do this.) You mentioned the importance of cohesion and collaboration in the workplace in your discussion postings.

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. If someone can deliver the right numbers of customer calls and customer satisfaction, then I don't need to be concerned about whether or not they used instant messaging or visited internet sites during the 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.

You mentioned asking workers to log tasks. As a consultant, I got into the habit of logging tasks so I did not forget to bill the client and so I could easily explain to the client what work was being done (if they asked).

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. It remains to be seen how much medicine will be done digitally in the future.

Finally, you mentioned that if deadlines were missed, you would suspend the work-from-home privilege immediately and have the worker come back to the office. By this standard, anyone who was late with a homework assignment would have to meet Monday and Wednesday nights at Dominican from 6:30 - 9:30 pm because that's how often a face-to-face version of this class would meet for an 8-week class. Worse yet, I would have to be there with you.

I sometimes work at the Evanston Library when I feel I will be too distracted at home.