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.