I was recently traveling from Houston, TX, back to Oklahoma City, and as usual, I was flying Southwest. If you have ever flown SW, you know the drill: Line up according to your boarding number, A1-A60 first. My boarding position this trip was A31, so I was at the very front of the second line. Things at the airport were running “normal”: there was nice weather outside and the process progressed per usual. However, our boarding time passed. This was curious, as the gate door was open and the gate agent was at the computer terminal ready to begin scanning boarding documents, but the pilot was loitering just inside the jet bridge. Normally, he or she would be busy readying the plane for takeoff. The gate agent was periodically talking with the captain, but they were out of earshot, so I …
Innovation ThinkTime
Innovation? That’s Someone Else’s Job…
I recently read an article posted on PYMNTS.com about innovation that caught my attention. The article was an excerpt of a new study conducted by PYMNTS.com about financial institutions’ readiness for innovation. You can read the article here. Some 200 bank executives were interviewed. Here are a couple of stats from the article: 78% of respondents say they struggle to innovate. Only 22% of respondents said they had access to effective core payment processing and IT infrastructure. The study went on to say that having effective IT and core systems was a key factor in whether a financial institution would be innovative. I am not trying to bash the PYMNTS.com study, but I do find this insight curious. Perhaps it’s the other way around: FIs that have a CSuite looking to be …
Another Good Deed… Definitely Punished
My wife Samantha was coming out to Oklahoma City for some R&R, and I wanted to book an aerial yoga session for her. She is a certified aerial yoga instructor, and so I was online looking for a class that would be suitable for her skill level. There were about a dozen options from the Google search I performed, and as I was going down through the list, they were each getting eliminated. Either the classes were too basic or they were not offered during the date and time options I had to work with. Until I got to Tough Lotus. Here was not only a website that offered the classes I was seeking to book in the timeframe I needed, but… OMG a bungee fitness class! This was my wife’s newest passion. (Having installed a bungee rig in our garage and watching her fly around the room, I can see …
A Restaurant Booth Whose Time Has Passed
I was driving through rural Nebraska recently with my wife Samantha on our way back to Oklahoma City. We were looking for a place to have dinner and saw a sign for an Indian restaurant at the next exit. Indian food perfectly met our dietary and hunger needs, so we exited and looked for the restaurant. With trepidation, we entered the restaurant, or, I should say, we entered the convenience store the restaurant shared space with. We were in the indecisive mode of “should we try this or bolt,” but decided to stay since the rest of our choices would be minimal for many miles. So we ordered food at the counter and went to sit down in one of the numbered booths (seriously, each booth had a number prominently displayed). We both immediately saw this after sitting down: There was one of …
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Does Customer Experience Really Matter
I was in the Penn Square Mall in Oklahoma City on a beautiful summer Sunday. The mall was reasonably busy, probably just right for a Sunday afternoon during a non-holiday shopping season. I was headed to the Apple Store, but on the way there, I passed by the Microsoft Store. Microsoft has attempted to duplicate the Apple Store in look and feel; plus, they have a natural draw to bring in younger shoppers, one that Apple does not have: the Xbox. There was a huge monitor and multiple player stations with Xbox game audio blasting into the mall—a virtual pied piper strategically placed to lure in Millennials. Except, it wasn’t working. Excluding the six Microsoft store employees, there were two other people in the Microsoft Store. Two. It could not have looked more like the “dead party” I …