Today marks the start of the Thanksgiving holiday, and for many, it means taking to the skies. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) estimates that it will screen 17.8 million passengers this weekend.
A more staggering statistic is that TSA reports passengers leave behind 90,000-100,000 items at security checkpoints each month! Items include driver’s licenses, passports, and computers, among the more valuable forgotten pieces.
If your organization experienced 100,000 instances per month (over a million times a year) where customers were inconvenienced, wouldn’t you design a system to prevent that? Have TSA hand people their items. Monitor what remains on the belt and call after people. Have people place their ID in each bin so they can be paged for retrieval. Put a tracker in each bin that is linked to the traveler when they check in. Something! Instead, the process continues as usual, with each item logged and stored, taking even more resources on the back end instead of fixing the problem upstream.
When the system isn’t working, it’s far better to find a solution than to just track how many times it’s broken.
