The Customer Experience

"Most travelers don't feel like they're in control," says George Roukas, 43, vice president of product management and customer service. "The rental-car companies and the airlines are always asserting control. We're trying to give some control back to the traveler. We not only listen to what customers ask for; we think about features that they wouldn't know to ask for."

The feature under consideration today addresses a problem that has become increasingly common in a world of crowded skies and delayed flights. It would automatically notify your hotel if your flight was delayed, increasing your chances of holding on to a room reservation -- even if you were going to arrive much later than you had planned. Some members of the development team are unconvinced. "We have to figure out when it makes sense for us to fax the hotel," worries Julian Winter, 41, director of member services. "Do we tell the hotel when your flight is delayed from 11 am to 3 pm? Or do we send a fax only when you'll be delayed past 6 pm?" It's an important question. How well this feature meets the needs of harried hotel staffers will help determine how well it meets the needs of Biztravel.com's customers. Says Winter: "We want to be sure that if a hotel is oversold, and if it's going to 'walk' some folks, it doesn't walk ours."

Lots of Web sites offer lots of whiz-bang features simply because they can. At Biztravel.com, the essence of creating a great customer experience is offering only those features that its customers truly value. "Our customers are road warriors," says Mimi Bloom, 34, director of customer acquisition and retention. "They're smart, they're resourceful, and they're pressed for time. And they have high expectations: If there's one remaining first-class seat and they've got an upgrade credit, they want to be in that seat. So we're forever asking the same question: What kinds of services do people like and need when they travel?"

Bloom and her colleagues gather answers to that question directly from their customers, via telephone contact and email. Programmers make it a point to spend a few minutes each day reading submissions to the site's customer-feedback inbox. Some recent additions to the site, such as a feature that prints out expense-account documents, are a direct outgrowth of those suggestions. Other enhancements -- such as a tool that filters out spelling errors when a user types in the name of a destination -- come from watching people use (and misuse) the site. A final group of features -- what Roukas calls "the sizzlers" -- get created mainly because they're cool, and because they set Biztravel.com even further apart from traditional travel agents.

Once the development team has approved and prioritized a new feature, the coding process begins. Here, too, the customer experience figures into how the company operates. Biztravel.com breaks down big ideas into small chunks defined by functionality. That way, the company can roll out new features more quickly, and its programmers can discover problems and gauge customer reaction -- before they spend months developing a feature that doesn't quite work or that people don't really want.

"We like incremental enhancements," says Winter, "because that way, we can tweak things and change direction much more easily in response to customer feedback. Lots of times, when you take big steps, you wind up telling customers that they had better like what you've done for them -- because you've spent so much time and so much money on developing it."

There have been lots of "incremental enhancements" since Biztravel.com was launched, in November 1996. Roukas says that he can't imagine a time when the six-week upgrade cycle would cease." Our list [of new features] never shrinks," he says. "When we page someone who's scrambling to get to the airport, and we let him know that his flight has been canceled, and then he's able to book another flight because he was the first to know about the cancellation -- well, that's the experience that we're going for. That creates a customer for life."

Dell Computer -- Measure What Matters

When it comes to delivering a great customer experience, lots of companies talk a good game. A few companies even play a good game. Dell Computer wants to reinvent the rules of the game -- so it's fanatical about keeping score. "We're a numbers-driven organization," says Jerry Gregoire, the company's CIO. "We're in our comfort zone when we can measure something."

Dell's eight-person Customer Experience Council was formed two years ago in order to focus all 26,000 pairs of eyes in the organization on a single priority. By Dell's reckoning, the company has more than 16 million "customer contacts" per week, whether in the form of emails, phone calls, deliveries, or returns. The challenge: How to monitor and measure the quality of those contacts?