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 "bigdata" 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

One of you said " In this day in age, I think working from home isn't something that needs to be highly debated. I agree. Five years ago, the students in this class were not enthusiastic about having people work from home.

If it weren't for Information Technology to provide a remotely accessible central database and technology to route the central support number to external phone numbers depending on who is not already on the phone or logged off, remote support would not have been possible.

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.)

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 makes 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 number of customer calls and deliver satisfied customers, 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.