Rudy Peterson was an American businessman staying at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. One day he left the hotel and headed for Arlanda Airport, north of Stockholm, to accompany a colleague on a Scandinavian Airlines flight to Copenhagen. The trip was only for the day, but it was important.

When he arrived at the airport, he realized he’d left his ticket back at the hotel. He had set it down on the bureau to don his overcoat and had forgotten to pick it up.

Everyone knows you can’t board a plane without a ticket, so Rudy Peterson resigned himself to missing the flight and his business meeting in Copenhagen. But when he explained his dilemma to the ticket agent, he got a pleasant surprise.

"Don’t worry, Mr. Peterson," she said with a smile. "Here’s your boarding card. I’ll insert a temporary ticket in here. If you just tell me your room number at the Grand Hotel and your destination in Copenhagen, I’ll take care of the rest."

While Rudy and his colleague waited in the passenger lounge, the ticket agent dialed the hotel. A bellhop checked the room and found the ticket—exactly where Mr. Peterson had said it would be. The ticket agent then sent an SAS limo to retrieve it from the hotel and bring it directly to her. As it happened, they moved so quickly that the ticket arrived before the Copenhagen flight departed. No one was more surprised than Rudy Peterson when the flight attendant approached him and said, "Mr. Peterson? Here’s your ticket."

One day after the Loma Prieta 6.8 earthquake shook San Francisco, a woman in her mid-thirties entered the Walnut Creek Nordstrom’s. The woman appeared unfamiliar with the store layout but eventually landed in Sandy’s department.

The woman explained that she lived in San Francisco’s Marina District (damaged by the earthquake). She was frazzled. She had just lost her apartment, it had been condemned, and she wasn’t allowed to enter it. She wasn’t familiar with the Walnut Creek store and didn’t know where to look for a dress—her sister’s wedding was on the coming weekend, and she didn’t have a bridesmaid’s dress. She had already purchased one from the San Francisco Nordstrom store, but her dress had been destroyed along with her other clothes. The woman described the dress in detail.

Although Sandy had never seen the customer before, she helped her find the right dress department. By this time, three other sales reps joined Sandy and helped the woman find the same dress—except it was a size 14, not a size 8, which the customer needed. To make matters more difficult, the Walnut Creek store had only a limited supply of that dress, all size 14 or larger.

On the spot and after discussion with her colleagues, Sandy gave the dress and the necessary alterations free to the customer. A happy, grateful customer left the store, and she received her resized dress on time for her sister’s wedding that weekend.

American Honda’s Information Services Division (ISD) realized that many of their Moments of Truth between its users, mostly internal customers, and their enterprise computing services organization is through a customer service center’s Help Desk function.

Even though they have many excellent technical employees supporting their computer operations, the Help Desk is managed by relatively few support experts. They receive help calls from all over the organization. And these Moments of Truth are critical. The quality of these interactions help ISD’s customers decide how well their IS systems are doing. And this occurs at only a very few points of internal customer contact: at the Help Desk, on the telephone, and with division liaison representatives.

The CIO said, "We need to focus on making these Moments of Truth the best they can be, especially as our systems migrate to more complex technology."

A customer left an urgent message on my voice mail saying that he and his wife had made an offer on a home, and he had to provide the seller with assurance of financing within ten days or their offer would be unacceptable.

When he had looked into the mortgage approval process, he realized that he had no idea how to get through the maze of forms, rules, and decision-making—not in ten days.

I faced several challenges: the ten-day time limit, my customers already owned a home and a condominium, and the husband was to leave in two days to give an IBM seminar in China. He would be gone for fourteen days.

Although I was in Los Angeles attending a bank course, I phoned the people needed to arrange the financing: my banking services officer, a mortgage officer, an appraiser, a title company officer, and my client’s bookkeeper. My strategy was for my client to keep and rent their existing home and to get new Sanwa Bank financing for the new home. If they qualified, Sanwa Bank would provide the required new financing. But nothing would be easy or guaranteed to happen on time.

Fortunately, before my client left for Beijing, he had a piece of helpful news: the condominium was rented, and the rent covered its mortgage payments, taxes, and the condo fee.

Within ten days, I assured my customers that home financing was available. When the husband returned from Beijing, he and his wife signed the documents. And their original home, which they kept, became a part of their retirement assets.

In the early days of the World Wide Web and Mosaic, Rockwell’s Information Systems Center (ISC), the company’s IT organization, established the corporation’s first home page.

Immediately after they went online, e-mail messages began to flow in from all over the world, seeking information about products, employment, business propositions, and community service. Many of these e-mail messages were going unanswered, so it was proposed that the official webmeister for the company be established in ISC.

The reason for this atypical assignment was that the ISC personnel were most familiar with the Internet and the intricacies of the directory services. And they were also most familiar with data sources throughout the company. But, most important, in ISC there was an intense interest in the Internet and the communications linkages it afforded.

It was a matter of representing the company to the electronic communications community throughout the world via the Internet. In this sense, a small group of IT personnel saw themselves on the company’s frontline.

Thus, for quite some time, the people who built the Internet/intranet facilities at Rockwell also provided the content to customers, prospective customers, employment applicants, and anyone seeking to engage Rockwell through this electronic medium.