watch out SF we are here

Well the important things have been done - my first locally brewed beer from San Fran has been consumed - unfortunately it tasted just like a crownie, so a bit of an anticlimax - here it is before the first sip...

Tomorrow I visit AAA NCNU to meet the team I will be working with and to say hi to all those people that have helped me get to this point. I am a little nervous and excited at the same time. This is also because they give me the keys to a car tomorrow, which means I drive a left hand drive car for the first time, and my first journey will be through the centre of a very busy city.

I have to say first impressions of SF are great, really relaxed vibe, clean (at least where we are) and all the mod cons within a stones throw. We have also found the corner shop (which is basically a fully fledged supermarket, pharmacy, bottle shop in one) also sells a large range of gluten free, which is great as my 4 year old daughter is coeliac and so this is a big worry off our mind. When we were in Salt Lake City there was practically no other option than grilled chicken for her - so thats all she ate for lunch and dinner over four days - no complaints - she is a trooper.

I am still buzzing from the conference we had in Salt Lake City, there were so many relevations that came from it. Particular for roadside assistance. If all of the clubs could combine their strengths into a single package this market would be sewn up and would be amazingly profitable. The highlights were pricing discussions with British Columbia Automobile Association and the New Zealanders shone again with their rewards package - such a nice program. Another really good club to watch is AAA Mid-Atlantic, they have really tied together the marketing machine and the analytics/database marketing - I really hope we can continue to learn from them through the relationships created. I also like the way the AA in the UK thought, their private equity ownership allows them to think a little more clearly - particularly when it comes to financially viable propositions. The trick with all of these is to understand the uniqueness of each market. By the way, the conference actually gave me a huge amount of new insights from the other Australian clubs - we have to continue to work on our australian collaboration, it is seems a little silly that we need to fly to the other side of the world to learn from each other (and I am certain I was not the only one who thought this). It is fair to say however that the conference was a key reason for the level of sharing, it was structured well, had the right people in the room (really formidable knowledge about the clubs in one place), and everyone wanted to share openly - no baggage, which not always the case in the domestic setting. A huge thanks to the AAA for creating this environment.

Anyway time to sign off, I hope I get to give another post tomorrow night - if there isn't one, then assume my driving wasn't a success....

First day of conference

Today was the first day of the conference. The content was all about the status of various initiatives between the AAA on MRM deployments and a key note talk from a Dinsey executive. One interesting starting clarification was that MRM has moved on to another acronym MMR - Member Managed Relationships, which signifies the power in the relationship rests to the consumer.  I think this is a good shift, but I guess we should stick with MRM for now, as the organisation is still grappling with that. Along the same theme was a philosophy presented by Disney's Senior VP Global Customer Relationship, Tom Boyles, he had many inspiring things to say including "no one owns the guest, but someone always owns the moment". Good food for thought.

by the way - if you were interested Tim won the bet, in the allotted 5 minutes, the beer cooled to 10 degrees celcius, so not within the perfect range in time - that took a further two minutes.

Other food for thought for RAC for the day were:

• the concept of automatic membership renewals, which are very prevalent in the US and simply involve taking credit card details and implementing a process to follow up on expired cards - evidently really good improvements to retention rates follow, and there is not much issue with rejected cards. I will find out more details in the coming days and weeks
  
• integrated member / employee engagement - that is measuring members and staff in the same way. the broad concept here is that alignment will lead to greater unification of staff towards a positive member engagement if they are more engaged themselves on the same basis. Early days yet, but I will follow up with the presenter on the results. By the way if you are interested this clubs' (AAA Arizona) engagement measure is based on a book called Human Sigma, written by John Flemming of Gallop - more reading for me for the plane!

There was lots of other interesting bits an pieces which I will update later. Need to run now.

Time to go

I am sitting down now at my desk at RAC on my last day in the office before I fly out on Sunday. I still have a mountain of "filing" to get done - I suspect that will entail opening a drawing and pushing everything in. I am really going to miss working with the Insights team, who constantly make me laugh. It is a really great combination that we have in the team with very high dedication to the job, balanced with an easy relaxed approach to working with each other.

One classic example of how this team "challenges" each other was "the bet" from yesterday, which erupted from some innocent comments on the best way to chill beer - a classic dilemna we all face from time to time. This team can take the most basic of challenges and turn it into a scientific experiement - see the conditions of the "the bet" below.

The Toadfish Rebecky has made a bet that he can get a room temperature beer, and turn it into the ideal drinking temperature within 5 minutes.
He will be using a mixture of Ice and Salt.

Conditions of the bet:
Ideal Drinking Temperature = 8 degrees Celsius for a bottom fermenting beer is assumed to be the ideal drinking temperature.
Room Temperature = within the range of 20 to 23.5 degrees Celsius
A stopwatch will be used to time the ‘submersion of the beer.’
The beer will be taken out of the refrigerating vessel at the 5 minute mark, and poured directly into a glass chilled to 8 degrees Celsius.
A thermometer will be placed into the middle of the glass (without touching the sides), and after 30 seconds the temperature will be recorded.

Harry loses if the recorded temperature is above 8.5 degrees Celsius… and also if it is less than 7.5 degrees Celsius (obviously too cold to fully appreciate the beverage).

It is this sort of precise thinking that gets applied to challenges of the RAC.

Anyway better get back to that "filing".

A new beginning

It is now only five days before my family and I fly out to the US. Initially we are going to Salt Lake City where I will be attending two conferences organised by the American Automobile Association (AAA) for the Global Response Roundtable (GRR) over three days : firstly a conference on Member Relationship Management initiatives looking at international club activities of relationship management systems; and an International Membership Symposium (IMS) discussing member engagement initiatives.

During the IMS, RAC WA will be presenting on its Market Research program, including some recent work completed on development of a Member Engagement Index. This index looks at the relationship that a member wants with the organisation and then assesses if that relationships expectations are being delivered upon. The really interesting element to this approach is it does not assume that a member of the RAC wants to be highly engaged, it only looks at if they are getting what they want. While is this facinating for me and the research team it might be a little dry for the attendees and unfortunately for me an the audience this presentation is in the after lunch session on day three. To keep the audience awake I am using this clip to demonstrate why we need to research - and to keep them interested!

I hope you like it.

Also I started a blog a couple of weeks ago on tumblr - jaminhirte.tumblr.com - however it did not allow comments, so I have moved onto blogger so you can post back to me. I hope to hear from you all!!