45 Kellogg Insight LEININGER: How do you use the richness of the data that you collect to reinforce loyalty or a sense of relationship with a customer? O’TOOLE: It lets us track and evaluate the customer experience over time and intervene if we see the relationship weakening or how to grow it. It enables us to be very, very informed about individual customer relationships. I’ll give you an example. The most valued benefit of being a Premier member of MileagePlus for many people is the complimentary upgrade. The availability of complimentary upgrades on a given flight is a func - tion of the bookings on that particular flight and the resultant seat avail - ability in the front cabin. It sometimes happens, just by circumstances, that a 1K member can have an extended series of flights without a com - plimentary upgrade. This can put us at increasing risk of losing a high- value customer. Now we track if an individual has had a run of X number of flights in a row and their upgrade never cleared. We can then automatically override the algorithm and intervene to be sure that the individual gets upgraded. This has been proven to result in a measurable business gain. LEININGER: You’ve got all these smart people on your marketing team, and they’re trying to figure out how to get more cash from each trans- action. How do you make sure that, as they write those algorithms to maximize cash, they do so in a way that is consistent with how you want the brand to be perceived? O’TOOLE: In terms of the brand, there are certain things that we could do that we just decide not to do based on brand considerations. Based on insights from Tom O ’ Too le and Eric Leininger