Thursday, March 13, 2014

Preventing planes from going missing ever again

The search for the missing Malaysian airlines plane is still ongoing several days after the plane disappeared from radar view. Could such a difficulty be avoided in the future? Various aviation experts have their own theories as to what has happened to the plane and what can be done to prevent such an anomaly from occurring again. Now the question is "can the issue of not being able to locate a plane be avoided in the future by using commercially available technologies today?". The answer is YES, with mobile devices.

As you know most Smart phones or devices are GPS enabled and such GPS coordinate or location can be made available by the device, for example to Google if it has Google service installed or to any other application that ask for location. If all airlines follow the example of Qatar Air on their 787 fleet where mobile services and WiFi services are available then it would have been easy to find the last known location of the plane even if it went out of radar range. But How?

Let's follow the thought of an individual who would board a plane with mobile service or WiFi service enabled. The person will then turn on his mobile device  on board, connect to the internet, use social media telling his friends how cool it is to be able to do that while in  flight. He might even send and SMS  or make phone call. All those activities can be location tagged, either stored on the phone or sent to a server somewhere depending on which application runs on the phone…

If such device for example has a customer experience agent such as Geoptima then the last known location of that device will always be available. Of course with just one device active or connected it is still an inaccurate location, but imagine what if all passengers use their devices… we can then look into history which of those device has last sent a location and where, in that case it would have been possible to know where the missing plane is and not spend millions of dollars and countless man hours in searching for its whereabouts.

If only we can contribute on our own little way to the world then at least we can help people and save tax payer's money…. To do that we will have to convince mobile operators first on its value but perhaps it is possible to provide such capabilities directly to consumers for free as part of our Corporate Social Responsibility program….

I am in Egypt, and I was hoping that the country has changed after several changes in its leadership. But sadly it has gotten worse. On my way to check-in for my flight I was met by a greeter asking to help... so I played along, I noticed he knew all the security guys in the airport, so every security check point he asked me to give money to the security guy (well I think he pocketed most himself). So I passed 2 security checks without being checked, not even going through the Xray machines... This is so rampant that anyone can smuggle anything outside the country without being checked for just 10 US$... Just imagine you can make a plane disappear for only 10$....





Sunday, March 2, 2014

Customer Experience Improvement observations at MWC and beyond

During MWC Customer Experience talk is all about implementation in various ways. Last year it was all about exploring the concept, now most vendors have  incorporated CEM in their portfolio in one way or another. Not only vendors and operators were talking about customer experience improvement programs but even regulators are moving from traditional technical metrics to customer experiences as the main metric to determine operator compliance to license conditions. This is all good and well, the question is how far are this programs going? Are there any success? Are they really making a difference to the bottom line?

I am on my way to Jakarta, flying via Qatar. I am always amazed how good services are with Qatar Air. Well this week have receive several upgrades from a normal room to a splendid suite from a normal airline seat to my own private cabin to the point that it get me thinking of a certain high flying club, but like in all personal things I wanted my better half for that.



Being in the Middle East the CEM award for Telcos come to mind. IQPC who is organizing the CEM Summit in Dubai should now have an idea on who the nominees are. If you ask me for nominees I would say best airline will be a toss up between Emirates and Qatar air…. Only problem is that the award is for telco… on which I can rate Qatar air low for having an inaccessible WiFi on board. Not only that is paid but you can't actually use it since instructions on how to connect is wrong or do not work. With this I admire Norwegian on the simplicity on how their WiFi on board service works.

In Dubai at the end of this month, Gurol Kurt of TeliaSonera will be talking about delivering promises like TeliaSonera. Now I can almost already confirm that TeliaSonera, at least in Sweden do not deliver that promise very well. Let me take my case while in Singapore Telia slapped me a very huge bill for data roaming when I receive an SMS saying I should pay a fixed fee per day instead they were insisting to bill me 100 SEK per KB of data, which by the way if anyone is aware of the European directive on roaming is against the law. On another instance I used my 4G services to watched the olympic games, then Telia told me I exceeded my data limit and need to pay additional fee to keep the fast data access. Well I signed up paying for the most expensive service, but then again I got the slowest possible data service. So much for promises perhaps Gurol Kurt can explain how TeliaSonera is delivering its promises. I will be all ears.

Talking about promises, During the MWC Vodafone launch Vodafone xone with the slogan "Delivering the  promise". I would say its about time and looking forward to Fay Arjomandi and Michael Callas  delivering on that promise. Vodafone Xone is supposedly a social discovery mechanism, making things easier for you by discovering what you want and making those choices available… Much like the way google analytics work but hopefully no advertisements like the Music Genome Project. I like to simple services and stand by KISS.. More about that on my next post. For now I will have to figure how to get Radhika Sasidharan to provide me an access to CEM MEA telecom summit.