Oliver Bell’s weblog

As I start writing this post I have to say that I am unsure if it will result in something positive or if it will just turn out to be a rant. My intention is really to talk more about what a growing group of people see as a potential next big step for CRM, I’m going to use the airline loyalty programs as an example, and after a truly terrible week of travel I’m not sure where that will take me. Here goes…

I travel too much, I know that, my friends know that and my family know that. Of course Singapore Airlines, our national airline, also know that although for them it isn’t too much, for them their CRM systems tell them that I fit into the category of being a valued customer.

SIAs customer relationship management system is second to none, their PPS program rewards me in all sorts of ways including personalized check-in, priority boarding and some great touches while I’m on board a flight. Speaking as a customer of SIA I obviously have no objections to any of this, but for SIA themselves it is a huge investment for what I sometimes think must be very little return.

For SIA I am already a captive customer, I’m going to fly with SIA regardless of how far out of their way they go to look after me. The general service that they offer is attractive, they fly to all the destinations I need, they have a great track record for on time service and so on. Of course I’m not complaining in any way about the extra touches, I’m just not convinced that they are the key to why I will remain a loyal customer.

The problem occurs when I use another airline, which on a number of occasions I really have no choice about. As an example I have been back in the United States this week and have had cause to use American Airlines a couple of times, another fine airline, but one that I have no status at all with.

My experience with American Airlines is of course a degraded one as a result of this, something that is additionally impacted by how spoilt I am when I travel with SIA. I joined a long line at check-in, trekked through security and queued for my seat which was situated in row 89W.

I’m starting to notice that I’m sounding a little like a spoilt brat at this point, I’m really not complaining though and somewhere in here I have a point to make, I’ll continue…

The Customer Relationship Management opportunity here is relevant to both of the airlines that I have traveled with this week.

First of all it is for Singapore Airlines, and for them the question revolves around when and how they see value in looking after their travelers, this proposition is a tough business decision for them and I am glad that my responsibility here ends with just writing something random on the Internet.

Ostensibly the decision is to either look after their customers only when they’re traveling with SIA, or will they at some point step up to being an airline that looks after their customers  regardless of which airline that they’re traveling with.

I’m sure that travelers like myself could be easily profiled into a category where it was obvious that additional carriers are frequently necessary, and a higher tier of PSS (which I would work hard to attain) could throw me into a complex set of managed partnerships and inter-airline agreements that ensured that customers are always looked after providing that SIA remain the core carrier whenever possible.

Speaking as one traveler, I would be happy to see SIA invest less in the services they offer me when I’m aboard their own planes in return for this service.

The second opportunity is for the other carrier in my scenario, and is probably an easier business decision but a more complex technological challenge. At no point during my travels this week did American Airlines try to collect my Star Alliance membership details, and why would they, it isn’t their network and I am therefore not their customer.

The opportunity though is not to just track the customers that you have with CRM, but to think about the customers that you could potentially have.

American could learn a great deal about me by capturing and in someway rewarding details of frequent flyer programs that are not theirs, maybe they could offer me a more rapid route to earning status with them with the goal that I will become a customer in the future, choosing American on my next trip to the US, or choosing to make them my default carrier if I ever relocated back to the States on some future date.

In short, CRM today is very much about how you look after your own customers when they are consuming services offered by your own company. In the future CRM has to evolve to give you ways to ensure you retain your customers even when they are choosing a different provider, or to track other companies customers with the goal of making them your own.

Back to my airline scenario, around ten years ago the One World and Star Alliance partnerships were created between a limited number of airlines with some of these goals in mind, but the evolution of these programs seems (speaking as a customer) to have stopped there. Technology offers us so many more opportunities today, and it is probably time to revisit some of the network programs that exist in many industries with today’s possibilities in mind.

I am confident that this opportunity is not confined to the airline industry, and I apologize for having picked on that single industry as an example in this post, I’m sure you get the point…