BQF Innovation

I flew to France recently with BA. I checked in online at home on the morning of the flight.  I printed my boarding pass at my printer and saved time at the airport.  Not all airlines offer this service and those that do gain a competitive advantage.  Anything that saves time, avoids queuing and makes flying less unpleasant is worth having.  Checking in at home is a service innovation.  Someone looked at the process and asked the question - how can we make it better?  The answer was to break up the process and relocate part of it to a different place - the user’s home.

Have you renewed you car tax online?  In Britain for years we have had to queue in a Post Office with our MOT certificate, insurance certificate and licence renewal form in order to get the licence that makes you legal.  Now you can do it online from the luxury of your home.  It is a public sector service innovation that is a real win/win.  The DVLA saves money in administration and the user saves time and inconvenience.  Once again the location of the service has been changed by using the internet.

If you provide services ask yourself these questions. ‘Can we relocate some or all of the service to make it more convenient to our customers?’  ‘Can we use the internet to provide our service differently?’  ‘Can we make life easier for our users?’  Remember that every service can be made better and customers love better service.

Paul Sloane

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.