aren't PR. They're IT, at least when you're talking about the customer-facing part of the business. For businesses that don't have a customer-facing side, ahem, that's a problem. Read on. I brought this one back for the added reason that I'm guessing many of you can especially appreciate this week my hissy fit over an bad travel experience I had with the airline industry over the summer.

Customer Service and Technology Posted by Renee Oricchio at 9:00 AM

The two go together like peanut butter and jelly. Let me put it this way. Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES! Nothing beats courtesy and respect extended from a real live human being.

But!

If you want to improve your customer relations, go talk to your IT department first. I'm guessing they'll be a lot more helpful than your PR person.

This comes from the perspective of a customer - me!

1. Customers want to be treated decently by the companies they do business with. They usually want it in the form of some sort of personal contact - or at least know that personal contact is a just-hit-O away, in case they need them.

2. After that, the real issue is immediate gratification. Customers want it now! Now, as in everthing. Customers want service - now. They want the product or service they're buying - now! They want buying information about the product or service - now! They want information about delivery - now! And if you screw up, they want an apology and a tangible offer to make amends - now!

Now let me tell you about my flight home from Florida last night.

I flew from Pennsacola, Fl to Charlotte, NC and then from there switched planes to fly from Charlotte into White Plains, NY. My layover in Charlotte was to be about a hour and a half. I was traveling alone with my two small children, one with special needs.

I'll leave the airline's name out of this. The tickets were purchased on Expedia a month in advance. Sometimes you can pick your seats online. This flight didn't offer that.

Murphy's law: me, my four year old with mild autism and my six year old were assigned seats on three different rows. It happened both coming and going. I tried to get it fixed at the ticket counter. I tried to get it fixed at the gate. At every turn, I was told to just work it out with the flight attendants. Eventually, it all worked out. But only after being directed by the stews to basically pick a row of seats and become squatters, sending the passengers assigned to those seats to our real seats. It was awkward to say the least.

Back to the layover. It turned out to be four hours, instead of 90 minutes. The reason for the delay: operational. Whatever that means. No other details were made available.

My travel experience could have been much easier if the airline in question had followed my two simple rules of customer service, as explained above.

I won't bother complaining about the lack of human interaction or sensitivity. What galls me is how the airlines continue to get away with being technological hicks when it comes to customer-facing processes.

It doesn't take a Cray supercomputer to figure out how to rejigger seats and put families together on a flight. When the tickets were booked, my children were noted as young children. Can't the airline industry come up with a piece of software that would factor that in when seats are assigned? Somewhere on the vast world wide web, there's probably a free mashup available for download.

The age of the Internet has ushered in another age: the age of transparency. Customers (i.e. people) have come to expect full disclosure on everything. Companies can't simply get by with just a what anymore. They have to supply the why too. Why was my flight delayed an additional two and a half hours. Mysterious operational reasons don't cut it.

Why can't airlines figure out how to send updates by voice or text message to the cell phones of passengers when a connecting flight is delayed?

Why can't airlines set up a social networking feature on their web sites, so passengers could anonymously message other passengers on the plane swapping around seats in advance?

If airlines can develop software to juggle all the different ticketing pricing tiers among a hundred or more seats per plane, why can't they do the same to juggle the personal needs of where passengers need to sit for comfort and safety?

I don't fly often, but when I do (as in earlier this week) it seems like the process of migrating me from check-in to boarding to grabbing my bags on the way out the door is no different than it was twenty years ago. A lot of really great technology has come along since then: great ways to communicate more effectively, streamline service and customize the customer experience.

The friendly skies may be friendly, but they are medievel compared to most other business sectors today.