Keeping customers and staff informed – in real time!

By Phil Douglas

Information - important when things are running well; essential when things go wrong. Airlines have to deal with snow storms and ash clouds. Phil Douglas explains how innovative solutions keep everyone informed.

“As critical situations develop, keeping everyone informed becomes more and more difficult.”
-Phil Douglas

Everyone wants instant information... companies want timely information about delivery delays, bus drivers need to be notified when roads are blocked, fuel companies notified when an aircraft arrives. As critical situations develop, keeping everyone informed becomes more and more difficult. The "Valentine's Day Blizzard" of 2007 is a good example. Heavy snowfalls and winter storms closed US airports as the bad weather rolled up the east coast. The situation escalated when airlines were not able to keep all the flight crews, passengers and airport staff informed. Airports were not able to handle the volume of passengers waiting at the airport; passengers were stuck on aircraft for up to 10 hours. The backlog took several days to clear, and the negative publicity even longer.

Customers at home, in the office or on the road expect to be informed. Mobile phones have revolutionized communication on the road, but traditional communication is still not excluded. Notification updates according to the customer preference and priority are important. If there is sufficient time before an event (your cruise ship departs in a week or even a month), we can email the information, but if this is time critical we will notify the passenger by SMS and optionally by telephone using IVR (Interactive Voice Response).

Knowing who has received the information is also a vital part of these applications. If a passenger acknowledges their rescheduled flight, the flight can be rebooked and they can proceed directly to check-in. No phone calls from a call center, no queuing at the ticket desk - just proceed to check-in, whether at the airport, online at home, or on their mobile device. Customer acknowledgement or feedback via SMS, mobile portal, interactive voice or the web site is fed back into a central system. Customers who do not reply can be escalated though the communications channels - for example, for email 10 hours before an event, to SMS within 6 hours, to voice within 2 hours and finally, if required, landing up at the call center.

Instead of waiting for an hour at the baggage carousel, we can now inform passengers as soon as their flight lands that their baggage did not make it, and even provide reference numbers and details of who to contact. Saving the customer time and frustration, and by demonstrating that everything is under control, ultimately creating a positive situation out of a negative one!

These solutions also need to be robust, reliable and capable of handling high traffic volumes - including extreme peaks brought on by abnormal operational conditions. Critical situations may only happen a few times a year but it's during these times that such applications become worth their weight in gold. During the recent volcanic activity in Iceland, spreading ash clouds far across Europe, 2e's applications were used extensively to notify ground staff, crews and passengers. In the past a call center would have handled these notifications as best they could, but with the situation changing every hour, and the vast number of customers and staff needing to be notified, the number of required call center personnel as well as available phone lines starts to grow exponentially, leaving automated notifications as the only practical solution. However, sending notifications instantly also has its challenges - in some cases the requirement is for 2e to give advance warning to staff and crew, so that they can prepare for the change in situation, and so we therefore sometimes need to delay the information to customers by a few minutes.

Just to add to the complexity, privacy and data protection are also extremely important and topical issues. According to law airlines are allowed to notify customers of operational issues as long as the information is relevant to the customer. Anything more than that is considered spamming - even if unintentional. For applications used within companies or between partner companies 2e also takes into consideration various other factors related to the notifications: time zone information to avoid calls in the middle of the night, rest periods for shift workers or night staff, vacation schedules and blackout periods set by customers or companies.

Social media (blogs, chat, Facebook, MySpace) have until recently had very little attention from business applications. There are already applications for Facebook to show your flight status online and we expect much more activity in this direction. It's all new territory but the growth of social media shows how quickly ideas progress in the internet age.

Mission critical systems need to be highly available and scalable, with "five nines" (99.999%) up-time being a requirement for many solutions. Redundant hardware provides the first level of protection, followed by automatic failover for the hardware and software components. Geographically separate hosting centers provide additional coverage in disaster recovery situations.

Every solution has different requirements and 2e is usually requested to fully customize our solutions to match the business processes. "Enterprise Messaging" is a relatively new industry buzzword, and this is only just beginning to be combined with the mobile and customer notification world. As more and more complex applications are developed, solutions such as "Enterprise Integration Patterns" have evolved. These "patterns", provided by products such as FUSE Mediation Router, are designed to reduce the development time of applications by using standard components, and providing the infrastructure to integrate and interact with many data sources.

The world is still in the first generation of messaging for business applications. There are many more opportunities available. Having direct and instant contact with customers has opened up a whole new world. The big winners will be those that prepare well, act swiftly and take advantage of the vast range of business enhancing ideas.

Biography:

Phil Douglas is CEO of 2e Systems in Germany, a company specializing in mobile solutions, web check-in and internet booking applications for the airline industry. They built their first mobile applications in 2000, and developed the world's first mobile barcode applications for check-in at airports. For more information see http://www.2e-systems.com/.