Twitter tracking of customer complaints

WSJ 6/24/10 D1 discusses how hotels are using Twitter and other social media tools to capture and respond to customer complaints. The scenario is that a customer checks into a hotel and complains about some aspect of the experience via Twitter. Hotel employees are monitoring such tweets and respond appropriate. This is extended to how businesses monitor and respond to online complaints associated with such sites as TripAdvisor.

Paying to avoid punishing conditions

Airlines have started introducing fees that allow customers to buy their way out of the unpleasantness of travel. Southwest Airlines is offering "Early Bird" check-in, which costs $10 and enables the customer to jump ahead in the boarding group A, B, C pecking order. American Airlines is offering something similar, with prices ranging from $9 to $19, which enables customers to board the airline before regular coach customers. Such fees may evolve into special pricing for a bundle of services, such as Family Plans for families traveling together. See WSJ 6/24/10 D1.

Suntan performance

An interesting product recently came on the market to help customers determine when they've had too much sun. UV-Sunsense is a band one wears around their wrist, which changes colors indicating the duration one has spent in the sun. Product is discussed in the WSJ, 6/15/10 D3.

Customer Service Growth

The Wall Street Journal reports that customer service is a growth engine (6/7/10, B6). Essentially, some organizations, including American Express, Walgreens, and Comcast, are giving customer service representatives more flexibility in handling customer problems. For example, companies are relaxing standards on "call times" and reducing reliance on scripts. The objective is better customer relationships and increased loyalty.

There is a catch to the above article, that may reflect the WSJ's increasingly blurry line between editorial and advertising. On the preceeding two pages (B3 and B5), there were large ads for Tony Hsieh's book on Delivering Happiness, which is all about redefining customer service. Hmmm...hit the reader with two ads for a book on customer service, then run an article about how customer service is a growth engine...something doesn't seem right.

Smog Squad

The city of Hong Kong has an interesting solution to reduce auto and truck polution in its city: the smog squad. The smog squad is a specially trained group of volunteer citizens who spot vehicles that are emmitting too much smoke and then report them to the authorities. (WSJ, 6/5/10, A1 - The Smog Squad of Hong Kong).

Cellphone Pricing to Modify Behavior

I discussed AT&T's plans to use new pricing strategies to gate unlimited cell phone bandwidth usage (see December), and now that has become a reality. In June 2010, AT&T announced that it would stop selling unlimited plans and instead charge extra for data consumption that exceeded a certain amount (WSJ, 6/4/10, B6 - AT&T Pricing Shift Will Test Behavior).

This decision reflects the Incentive component of the Coproduction Experience Model in that the pricing plan now includes a punishment (increased costs) for the use of bandwidth beyond a certain amount. AT&T claims that such a policy will limit bandwidth hogs who download TV shows to their iPhones (or at least more fairly charge bandwidth hogs for their use of a limited resources).

AT&T's policies are very similar to what is happening in the utility industry, where dynamic pricing of electricity aims to reduce consumption on peak days, and therefore increase reliability of the electric grid (and reduce the need to build new generation capacity).