Sick and tired of dealing with the American Airlines fiasco? What can a solid CRM system do to avoid this type of scenario, and are you prepared for when the wheels come off?
Remember when it was fun to fly? Yeah, it's been a looooong time, huh? I don't think many airline customers are stuck dreaming about "the good old days" of flying. Most business flyers want fair and reasonable pricing, and at this point, I'd be happy to be treated in a manner where someone actually seemed to appreciate my business. Now, we have to deal with cattle-car like experiences, stripping down to the point of worrying about a cavity search through security, and plastic knives that can't cut plastic food. And that's on a good travel day.
And then it gets worse. If you fly American Airlines, you may have just experienced a world of hurt when thousands of flights were cancelled, stranding people on short notice. Well, American did send an email apologizing for it. Did that make you feel any better? For most people I know, it was a paltry attempt at appeasing customers that the airline may never get back. In fact, it ended up pissing them off more for what American Airlines didn't know about them, than what it did. Given the way the email read, it seemed like American had no idea whether the individual it sent the email to had been impacted or not.
How is it that in this uber-connected world a company can make such a snafu? You can get your entire itinerary online. In fact, the entire airline industry is reliant on the digital world. How could it be so myopic as to not be able to match digital tracking information with those who were affected, and how could it not provide emails specific to each customer's circumstance? CRM? Not even close.
This dates back to when companies, usually traditional ones, become so bureaucratic that they split into mini fiefdoms of inefficiency. In essence, the right hand not only doesn't know what the left is doing, it often slaps at it trying to grab the same thing. In those cases, they both drop the ball.
Many companies think that internal homegrown digital systems save them money, and they do, but this is often short-term thinking that only works against the long-term needs of their customers. In the rapid expansion of digital, there are companies whose sole job it is to tweak and improve the systems they sell. Often this means they become more robust, dynamic and offer many more features to serve those customer needs -- because they adapt. Internal systems tend to limp along once launched, only seeking to work out bugs. It then becomes a maintenance cost for the company, and one that internal groups are always trying to fight to get money to improve but rarely do.