10.05.06

As part of my role at GXS, I get to attend a few conferences through the year, particularly those of key partners like webMethods and Microsoft.  I’m currently at the BizTalk/SOA conference, which has been very interesting — especially yesterday…

One of my marketing colleagues is at the conference — he manages the Microsoft relationship for GXS — and he was trying to alter his travel plans.  Like me, he has some favorite airlines (who shall remain nameless…), some of which have long legacies, and some of which are very young.  He was “sharing” his frustration with one airline’s website, so I suggested he tell their lead architect, who was standing a short distance away in conversation with a member of the BizTalk marketing team.

He didn’t think this was such a great idea (possibly envisioning a lifetime of middle seat assignments in his future), but I walked over and shared the feedback anyway.  The architect promptly stopped what he was doing, came over to my colleague, thanked both of us for being customers, and asked us to explain the issue.  Interestingly, he urged my colleague to finish up his transaction — not wanting to mess up his travel plans — and then went through the itinerary change process step-by-step to see what was frustrating.

(what the issue actually was:  client side Javascript validation was requiring the entry of more data in a form than was strictly needed to do the requested task.  In particular, the interface did not leverage its onfile knowledge about members of the airline’s frequent flier program).

The architect explained the issue and promised to look into it, and then promptly chatted us up about the overall experience, how we felt about storing credit card numbers, the consistency of the overall experience, and a bunch of other “business” issues. 

I like to point this out because I think often times B2B/E-Commerce people have a passion for service that goes unheralded.  Unlike many software integration disciplines, B2B/E-commerce almost always requires extensive interactions with people — both customers and suppliers — and a genuine commitment to helping them use the infrastructure successfully.  I like this story, but in my interactions with our customers (sadly, this particular airline is not one of ours….), it is not unusual — most B2B teams have a real passion for their businesses and their work.