Loyalty360 Reads: April 25th, 2018

The latest news in the world of customer experience and customer loyalty.
 
Amazon Opens Its Delivery Options to Car Trunks
Amazon is taking its customer service efforts to another new level. OK, sure, it can deliver your orders within an hour or so with Amazon Flex. It’s working on delivery via drones. It will even drop off packages inside your house with Amazon Key. Starting yesterday, April 24, it pushed the boundaries once again by creating a new service that delivers your packages and puts them in the trunk of your car. The limitation is you have to have a 2015 or newer model GM or Volvo model with a car service such as OnStar so the trunk can be unlocked wirelessly. That’s about seven million cars, but it’s working on ways to include more cars. Several layers of security, of course, are built in. Still, an article in The Motley Fool, asked the obvious question: Why would anyone allow this? The answer, it reasoned, is that too many packages are stolen by porch pirates when left outside, and that people still are leery of letting an Amazon delivery dude in their house when no one’s home. This is a baby step toward that. Car access is one thing; house access is another. Plus, it could be Amazon’s next step toward controlling every step of the delivery process.
 
Kidbox Dresses Up Business Model Through Giving Program
Subscription boxes are everywhere these days. There are quite a few for foodies. There are some for dogs. Men’s grooming. Women’s beauty products. Exercise. You name it. Sign up, kick back and receive surprise goodies in a box every month or two. So it should be no surprise that there’s now one targeting kids—Kidbox. OK, so it’s not really for kids but the parents that shop for them. Let Kidbox know what you like, it personalizes a box with all kinds of clothes from a wide variety of brands, sticks it in the mail and it’s like Christmas five times a year. What makes Kidbox special, though, is what it does beyond pack and mail boxes. It’s worked a corporate responsibility program into its business model, donating clothes to a child in need via a charity of the subscriber’s choosing. The goal is to provide clothes to a million children in need. Of the 46 million Americans living in poverty, 16.4 million are kids ages 2-12, and most have never owned a piece of new clothing. And, the company says, it’s also a great way to start the conversation with your children about giving back.
 
Equifax Utilizes AI to Create New Predictive Small Business Success Model
Equifax has been grading people based on their perceived credit risk for decades, and does the same with businesses through its Commercial Financial Network (CFN). Yesterday, it created a program utilizing machine learning that blends the two credit-analysis tools and allows it to predict the likelihood of a small business filing for bankruptcy, taking a charge-off or incurring severe delinquency within the next 12 months. If a company doesn’t have a strong CFN score, for instance, and its owners have low credit scores, there’s a good chance things aren’t going to work out so well financially in the not-too-distant future. The goal of the Commercial Insight Delinquency Score, the company said in a press release, is to allow customers to lend more intelligently to a greater number of qualified borrowers.

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