Recently on a cross-country flight, I was just waking up when the flight attendant asked me what I wanted for lunch. She was a little annoyed because I kept her waiting while I  looked  through the magazine for food choices, and gummed up the whole works. And who could blame her for being annoyed? She had a whole bunch of people to get serve. I made a hasty selection and mistakenly picked the healthy snack box (organic pumpkinflas granola and apple slices instead of pepperoni and a chocolate chip cookie).

About an hour later, I had some serious hunger pains and would have killed for one of those old-school gummy chicken casserole airline dinners.

What would have solved this? A proper online engagement architecture, naturally. I usually print my boarding passes out ahead of time. So why doesn’t an airline print out the food choices under the boarding pass, or distribute via mobile devices as people increasingly use them for check-in? The airlines could provide other information, too, like how full the flight is, and whether NBC in the Sky will show something good like “The Office” or something not-so-good like “The Marriage Ref”.

So, what’s the problem? Content management and delivery systems aren’t unified.  There are all kinds of opportunities to present rich, consistent, engaging multichannel experiences by integrating technologies such as content management, customer relationship management, document output management, email campaign management, and others. But these are still siloed, due to legacy issues as well as market dynamics (there is no unified solution on the market).

We’ve been talking about the 360 degree customer experience for years. But the exciting thing: this isn’t just theoretical any more. I’m starting to hear Forrester clients talking specifics and wanting to know best practices about how to tie these together. We’re seeing companies starting to seriously strategize for this. And they'll be supported in some ways by vendor strategies and market consolidation.

We’ll be publishing more about this in the latter half of 2010. If you have a good story to share on this topic, let me know.