Who collects more detailed customer information than Chase and United Airlines? So why do they screw up simple stuff? Will big data just let them screw up in more detail?
Robert Gerber, writing in Datanami, reports on the critique of big data by Dr. Peter Fader, co-director of the Wharton School of Business:
“...it reminds him of another bubble that infiltrated enterprise IT no so long ago--customer relationship management (CRM). Like big data, he says, the CRM concept focused on collecting and analyzing transactional information, but failed to achieve its given goal.”
With Chase, where I have a credit card linked to a New Jersey and a Wisconsin bank account, I tried to link my mortgage to the Wisconsin account as well through Chase.com. After several days nothing had happened and when I tried to work it out online I was instructed to call the service center where I hit a series of menus. Press 1 for ... etc. I quit. If you are going to have online service it ought to work. If it doesn’t, you should provide a direct service line to someone who has the power to fix things.
Gerber quoted Fader saying: “…ask anyone today what comes to mind when you say ‘CRM,’ and you'll hear ‘frustration,’ ‘disaster,’ ‘expensive,’ and ‘out of control.’ It turned out to be a great big IT wild-goose chase. And I'm afraid we're heading down the same road with Big Data.”
After a minor luggage problem with United Airlines a year ago, a manager very kindly gave me a $100 travel certificate.
Great customer relations, right? At least until I tried to redeem it.
After 15 minutes on the United site I had a trip from Milwaukee to Charlotte that fit my schedule. I entered the certificate code. Rejected. Entered it several more times, adding and omitting outlier numbers to see if that made a difference. The site told me to call customer service.
That landed me with one of the slower reservation people I have ever encountered. She said I had to use a phone agent to make a reservation to redeem the certificate. Then I had to read her all the flight information because she had trouble finding the details on her system. I couldn’t redeem the certificate on the phone -- I had to pay the full bill and mail the certificate to Houston for a credit.
Great and generous customer service at the airport, goodwill severely dented by the redemption experience.
Returned from Charlotte, I got a chatty email from the manager of the Omni Hotel asking if I had enjoyed my stay. Yes, I wrote back, but I had left my phone charger in the room. Could they send it to me.
Nothing.
These aren’t exactly CRM or data problems -- they are problems of customer service execution and lousy online systems. Chase and United have had online operations for years, so why can’t they make them work? Don’t push me out to a call center and a telephone menu for some simple operations. As for the Omni hotel in Charlotte, if you aren going to ask me about my stay and act like a pal, at least respond to my reply.
American Express gets this right, at least in my experience. They act on emails, even when the request falls outside simple guidelines -- like canceling a months-old charge for an order that never came through. I’ve read that they train their front-line people, including the social media responders, and then empower them to act. One of these days I may try to find out how they make this work when so many others fail.
But I have to agree with a point I think Fader is making -- big data isn’t going to solve failures to execute on service.
