Integrated information systems improve the customer experience
Recently, I had two poor customer experiences that made me realize how important integrated information systems are to the customer experience.
The first involved Eurostar, the London-Paris-Brussels train service. My partner, Janine, recently took a holiday and needed to buy a ticket from Paris to London. She called the Eurostar telephone booking line but was told that no seats were available on the date she needed to travel. However, on the same day, I was able to find tickets for the same date on Eurostar’s website. Why? As it turns out, the telephone booking operators can’t access the same ticket booking system that the Eurostar website uses.
The second involved TV Licensing. (Believe it or not, you have to have a license to use a television in the UK.) While Janine was on holiday, a TV Licensing enquiry officer arrived at our flat, asking to see the license for the television that we used. I couldn’t produce the license at the time because I didn’t know where it was. Later that day, I found the license, made a copy of it and sent it to TV Licensing, thinking that the issue would be resolved. A few weeks later, I received a letter from TV Licensing saying that an inquiry officer had visited our home and because he wasn’t presented a TV License, we were required to purchase one immediately. Upset, I called TV Licensing immediately and told them that I copied the license and sent it to them several weeks ago. The representative said that our license was up to date in their system, but she couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t receive another letter from the inquiry service. Why? As it turns out, her information system was completely separate from the information system that the inquiry service uses.
In both cases, the situation could have been avoided if each organization had an integrated information system. Janine would have been able to purchase the same train tickets over the phone that I could purchase on the web. The phone representative would have been able to notify the TV Licensing inquiry service that my license was up to date, and there was no need for further warnings. My life would have been easier, the organizations would have saved money, and all parties would go away happy.
- 21 Jun 04
- experience, personal, service design
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Comments
In many cases, the reality is for many businesses, it’s easier and cheaper to screw up and let the customer solve the problem than to integrate sytems and processes. It would undoubtedly be expensive and very very hard to integrate the two databases owned by Inquiry and Licensing, and even harder to get peoples’ work practices to change to accomodate the integration. Telephone companies, for example, basically lose money on consumers like you and I, so there’s really no corporate incentive to improve customer service except from a PR point of view.
Sadly, it’s more cost-effective and efficient to let you find and solve the problems for them—hey, it’s “bottom-up, customer-driven process integration” after all. (This is something that Paula Thornton, a great advocate for customer-centric integrations, would never agree with, however.)
andrew on 2 Jul 04
How annoying! You could take a picture and send it in to thisisbroken.com…
Mark Hurst on 2 Jul 04
Mark: I’m not sure what I would take a picture of in this case, but a picture of my frustrated face on each occasion would be amusing. :)
Joshua on 6 Jul 04