Y U NO Analyze Everything ?!?!?
I had an interesting conversation the other day with a colleague who works for one of the largest airlines in the world and we talked about a recent incident that was widely publicized and made them look really bad. He told me there was nothing they could have done to prevent it, so I asked if there was a way to prevent it from happening again, to which he said he was unsure. The problem was that there was no way to know the chain of events that would lead to the disastrous outcome, he continued, and no way to stop it from happening in the future. No way? Really?
So we tried to break it down and see what the company knew about this particular customer. Well, they knew a lot. They knew his entire travel history. They knew how many frequent flier miles he had, when he got them and how he used them. They knew how many bags he checked in for each flight and what his favorite airport was. They knew when he used the web, when he called in for live help and when he checked-in at a self service kiosk at the airport. They knew how often he requested an aisle seat, that he was a vegetarian and that he sometimes traveled with a pet. They knew everything about this passenger, but yet they still managed to ruin his travel experience. Why was that?
The answer was simple. All the information they had was just disjointed data about one passenger out of the millions they have. And this data, although robust and colorful, could not tell them everything they needed to know about this passenger’s behavior and experience over time. It didn’t help that the data was stored in several unconnected systems and was owned by different groups with different goals and incentives. Of course they had no way of knowing something was about to happen, why it happened and no way to know it might happen again to someone else. If you only count how much of something happened and you’re not analyzing everything, you’re missing the point. You will never be able to understand the customer’s journey.
So I asked him why they don’t analyze everything?
I got a bunch of excuses. It’s too hard. It takes too long. They’re too big. Some of the systems are too old. Some of the data is bad. They don’t have the right tools. Excuses, excuses!
Companies spend millions on technology solutions that don’t give them the right results or the right information. These solutions don’t make them smarter, they just make them better at counting. They can easily create a report that will look at all the information they have about a customer and then see if there are any other customers who are like him. But that’s obviously not enough, because what they really need is a system that can see the customer’s experiences throughout his lifetime and automatically analyze the patterns that emerge from those experiences. Then they need to see who else has similar experiences. And that’s hard to do, but not impossible.
The technology to crunch big data sets at lightning speeds is here right now. The ability to look across and into every platform, every format, every transaction, every interaction, every event – is available to companies who want to get a competitive advantage. If it was easy then everyone would be doing it. But it’s not impossible.
ClickFox does it every day.
