Good decisions need one accurate picture of the situation. That picture doesn’t happen by accident. Someone has to decide what the record is and keep it in one place.
In my work, that matters more than anywhere. After a disaster, one family can have dozens of needs in the first few days. Travel, hotels, food, medicine, paperwork, questions about what happened. Now multiply that by a couple hundred families, all needing help in the same short window.
You can’t keep track of that in your head, in email chains, or in a spreadsheet that gets copied to everyone. The families who are easiest to reach get help first. The quiet ones fall behind, and they show up later in interviews and in lawsuits.
I learned this long before I did this work. In the early 1980s, I worked in customer service at Delta. Problems that passengers weren’t happy with got passed up to a small group of us.
One simple problem clarified it. A passenger would hand a flight attendant a $20 bill for a $3 drink and never get his change. He would complain, and the complaint landed in two offices at once. The two offices didn’t talk to each other. Sometimes the same passenger got two $17 refund checks for the same $17.
Nobody did it on purpose. The information just lived in two places.
I couldn’t fix the airline, but I could fix my corner of it. I built a database of customers and cases, so we could see a passenger’s history and answer them the same way every time. We had built a CRM before anyone called it that.
The database wasn’t fancy. It just let whoever picked up the phone see what we’d already told that passenger. It’s the same job today. The person talking to a family shouldn’t have to ask them to repeat everything, or tell them something different from the last person.
I wrote the full story on Substack, including what a single family needs in those first days and why the volume changes everything.
Read the full piece on Substack →
Jeff Morgan is the founder of Aviem International, a global emergency response firm that helps companies prepare for and respond to mass casualty events.