Big Data: delivering lousy customer service faster than ever
October 18, 2012 § 1 Comment
Whether you’re watching TV or browsing the Web, it seems you can’t escape advertisements touting how Big Data will transform life on earth: “Let’s build a smarter planet”, for example.
But what if I told you that using Big Data – especially when paired with automated decision algorithms – in the wrong way can annoy your customers, damage your reputation, and help drive away business faster than ever? To illustrate my point, let me share a personal story of Big Data and algorithms run amok.
For many years, I’ve rented cars from a large outfit. I won’t say their name, but it begins with ‘H’, ends with ‘z’, and sounds like a word to describe pain. I’ve spent thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of dollars with them, and I was a satisfied customer.
After returning from a business trip in 1997, I received a letter stating that I owed $200 for a dented door. I wrote back and said that since I didn’t have any incidents with the vehicle, the charge must not be correct. In response, they sent me a letter stating, in effect, that I was dead to them. I was a little taken aback by the abrupt correspondence (does anybody remember CRM?), but they’re not the only car rental outfit so I took my business elsewhere.
Fast forward to 2011. I decided to give them another chance, and rented a vehicle – without incident – from a US airport. In early 2012, I needed to go to France for a business trip so I made a reservation through Auto Europe. They in turn sent me a voucher for the Marseilles airport office of this very same auto rental company. Here’s where things really go awry: when I arrived in Marseilles – at night and pretty jet-lagged – their counter staff ran my drivers license and told me, essentially, to take a hike (I believe the proper phrase is dégage!). They told me “our computer won’t let us rent to you”. They were very nice about it, but there was no recourse: no person to call, no place to override the rejection, nothing. Fortunately, my story has a happy ending: Avis came to my rescue; they really do try harder.
Here’s what I think happened: sometime between 2011 and 2012, the CRM-challenged rental car company enabled real-time access to decades of vehicle renting history. After all, this type of scenario is a classic Big Data use case. Once this historical data was online, they probably exposed all of it to their customer-facing systems. To their algorithm, I probably showed up as a shifty felonious type, prone to carjacking and other crimes, all over a 15-year-old $200 dispute, and despite my generating large amounts of revenue for them over many years. So it categorically rejected my rental. And to make matters worse, they left out a way to override their idiotic systems.
This is a trivial example, but imagine if you’re denied a job, a car loan, a mortgage, entry into a country, or something else important because of the intersection of crummy customer service, bad programming, and Big Data. What if there’s no one who understands why the rejection has taken place? What if you find someone who cares, but is powerless to help? Big Data can uncover many more reasons to say ‘no’, and only the wisest enterprises will realize that there needs to be a series of checks and balances built in to these powerful systems.
I’ll be blogging about this essential topic in the coming weeks because I believe that it has the potential to be extremely disruptive to normal, ongoing operations for every type of organization.
IT committees appear to adopt wartime sabotage tactics
October 8, 2012 Comments Off on IT committees appear to adopt wartime sabotage tactics
Faced with a long transpacific flight, I loaded lots of reading material onto my new Kindle paperwhite. I’ve found Project Gutenberg to be a great source for interesting free books. One of the titles I selected was the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. After all, you never know when you’ll be called upon to derail a train or cause a dam to burst.
In WWII, the United States Office of Strategic Services put out this entertaining and surprisingly well-written book. It was designed to help civilians figure out ways to quietly but effectively disrupt Axis daily operations in occupied Europe. But as I was reading it, I noticed that the section on tactics for damaging meeting and conference efficiency in Axis wartime industries bears an uncanny resemblance to the ways that I’ve seen IT committees – both standards bodies and internal – operate. See if any of the following tricks to destroy productivity sound familiar:
(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing a series of blog posts about SOA governance – a responsibility that’s particularly susceptible to ‘sabotage’. I’ll supply some suggestions to keep things moving along and help avoid this unfortunate outcome.
Hadoop For Dummies is now available
October 4, 2012 § 1 Comment
I’m happy to announce that the Hadoop For Dummies mini-book that I wrote for IBM/Platform Computing is now available. You can download it here.
rdschneider 
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