measurementanalysisinstruments

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

Mastercam Partners with TITANS of CNC

Mastercam Partners with TITANS of CNC CNC Software, Inc., developers of Mastercam, has announced a new partnership with TITANS of CNC, Inc. to help train the next generation of highly skilled CNC machinists. The organizations have entered into a three-year partnership to develop media that advocates for CNC education and high-level aerospace manufacturing processes. TITANS of CNC is a free educational platform, consisting of more than 3,000 online courses, that guides students and teachers through CNC machine operation and programming. The Academy consists of online courses in fundamentals, learning CAD, CAM, advanced work holding, 5-axis, and more. The organization has an expansive following among students and professionals in manufacturing and are preparing the release of TITANS of CNC: Aerospace Academy – a tutorial-based platform teaching high-level manufacturers the skills necessary to produce complex aerospace parts using the most difficult materials. “We are proud to partner with such an inspirational team,” said Meghan West, president, CNC Software, Inc. “From the beginning of our existence, CNC Software has made a concerted effort to address the educational market. We have always recognized the importance of recruiting young minds into our field. TITANS of CNC has made it their mission to do just that. We are proud and humbled to be working with such a wonderful group of people that have the same mission,” West continued. As a result of this partnership, TITANS of CNC will feature Mastercam in the production of videos for education and social media purposes.

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

Forkhardt Acquires Soft Touch Technology

Forkhardt Acquires Soft Touch Technology Forkardt Inc. announced the acquisition of the intellectual property (IP) Soft-Touch® technology assets from General Manufacturing Systems, a supplier of custom workholding products in Saginaw, Michigan. With Soft-Touch, Forkardt strengthens its advanced custom and highly specialized workholding capabilities and IP portfolio for challenging applications in the automotive and aerospace markets. With this acquisition, a Forkardt spokesman said, “we will now provide a leading technology solution for thin walled, advanced materials, where part deformation is a concern. The unique Soft-Touch chuck design allows clamp fingers to actually conform to a part’s natural, as processed contour. Coupled with regulated clamping pressure, the resulting force dynamics actually give rigidity to fragile and delicate parts”. The acquisition closed in October, 2019. Terms were not disclosed

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

Mitutoyo America Corporation Announces Sponsorship With Titans of CNC

Mitutoyo America Corporation Announces Sponsorship With Titans of CNC Mitutoyo America Corporation announced a sponsorship agreement with Titans of CNC, a free project-based education platform that helps guide students and teachers on CNC machine operation and programming. The Academy provides over 3,000 free online courses in CAD, CAM and CNC machining techniques, and is now used by over 45,000 members in 170 different countries. Mitutoyo metrology products will be featured in both the Titans of CNC Show airing on Titan TV and will be utilized on Titan CNC Academy videos for demonstration purposes. “As a leader in the field of precision metrology, Mitutoyo America is excited to partner with Titans of CNC Academy. We look forward to supporting skill development in US manufacturing by providing metrology experience and leading technology to the Titans of CNC team,” says Matt Dye, president of Mitutoyo America Corporation. Titans of CNC will highlight Mitutoyo products through video tutorials in Gilroy’s personal manufacturing facility located in Rocklin, CA. These videos, along with other content, will be featured on Titans of CNC social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Titans of CNC was started by Titan Gilroy as a CNC machine shop in Northern California focused on making the most difficult parts in aerospace. The company transitioned into a massive reality TV series as a world-first CNC educational platform recognized by a global network of engineers, machinists, hobbyists, students and educators.

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

Methods Machine Tools AnnouncesPartnership With OKK Corporation

Methods Machine Tools AnnouncesPartnership With OKK Corporation Methods Machine Tools, Inc., announced that effective October 1, 2019 it is representing OKK Corporation in North America. For over 100 years, customers worldwide have relied on OKK horizontal, vertical, and 5-Axis machines for quality, reliability, precision and innovation. “We are very pleased to announce our new partnership with OKK to import, distribute and provide service and support for its broad range of high-quality machine tools,” said Mr. Mark Wright, president and CEO of Methods Machine Tools, Inc. “The addition of the larger capacity line-up of OKK horizontal, vertical, and 5-Axis machines ideally complements our current machine solutions.” OKK machines have a rigid construction and versatile design, and offer over 60 models of horizontal, vertical, and 5-axis machines to serve industries such as aerospace, automotive, energy, die/ mold and more. To ensure 100% quality control, OKK produces all key machine tool components in-house such as spindles, mechanical gears, precision square slide guide ways and special controller features. Horizontal machining centers from OKK include the HM Series which are fast and powerful and provide easy access, maintenance and operation. The OKK HM Series is offered in several sizes with Big Plus 50-taper spindle, and a high-speed rotation APC and ATC by synchronization cam (OKK patent), delivering smooth performance and production efficiency. The HM6000S is an all-new HMC that supports face mills up to 11.81” and features an extended rigid spindle that enables tools to reach to the back side of the work envelope. OKK vertical machining centers are exceptionally well positioned for aerospace, mold making and other demanding applications. The VM/R series, featuring large box-ways, high torque and high horsepower spindles, is designed for ultra-heavy duty cutting of titanium and other exotic materials. The VM/R series comprise of several models including the VM53R which features increased rigidity in the main body and the spindle to provide high cutting performance. The VMC’s have highly rigid and accurate box-ways similar to traditional machining centers.

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

Customer surveys: Perils of rewarding staff on scores

Satisfaction surveys should be about understanding how well you are meeting the needs of your customers. Once you know this, you can continuously improve how you deal with them. Satisfied customers will keep coming back. Dissatisfied customers won’t come back and they’ll tell their friends to avoid you like the plague. That provides a simple and hard-nosed message about how satisfaction surveys can drive revenues and profitability. In reality, a lot of customer satisfaction surveys have steered a long way from that simple ideal. They have become wrapped up in numerous business metrics, audits, incentive payments and benchmarking, which may have little to do with understanding genuine customer satisfaction. Whilst the mantra of ‘What gets measured gets managed’ is true, most surveys have extended that to include ‘What gets incentivised gets managed’ – resulting in rewards and penalties being paid on the results to the surveys. The unintended consequence of putting money on the scores is that people ‘game’ the system. They manage the scores, not the underlying issues. Tom Goodwin, the Head of Innovation for Zenith Media, agrees. In Raconteur’s Future of Advertising publication (13 March 2019), Tom talks about Five Mistakes Marketers Should Avoid in 2019. Number one on his list is “Measuring precisely the wrong thing”: “Inboxes today, even after a short trip, look like a paranoid mess: “How did we do? Was your trip OK? Tell us how to improve. We want to hear back!” I’m sure I could take a dump in a petrol station forecourt and I’d soon be asked to rate it (the location that is) by text. The thing is, requests for feedback are rarely exactly that. “Please tell us how you feel” comes from a noreply@ email address and what’s really been sought is one thing – the net promoter score. What’s happening is that marketers’ bonuses are being calculated about the rise and fall of a very precise, but entirely pointless, score.  To make matters worse, the actual labour is done by the most valuable customers there are – frequent users. The digital age has created endless, abundant, fast, free-of-charge data that is both easy to measure and absolutely and entirely useless. Reviews tell you only how people are, not what they experienced. Scores are barbell shaped to represent delight and anger. The only scores that matter are soft, qualitative, emotional, anecdotal and slow to change; they are hard to measure, hard to attribute, and there are many unknowns.” One of the most successful approaches Feedback Ferret has seen for shifting away from rewarding the scores is to reward the follow-up communications that help to build the relationship between a brand and their customers. This is about closing the loop after the survey has been carried out. First, make the survey customer-friendly so that it focuses on customer feedback, not an audit. That should give the customer scope to say openly how they felt about their experience. Then, following up on any issues enables problems to be nipped in the bud early on, as well as thanking customers for positive feedback. This type of approach has demonstrated continuous rises in Net Promoter Score ratings – without any financial reward on those scores – at the same time as substantially reducing goodwill payments and calls to customer services departments. We have many instances of clients saying the verbatim comments from customers are the most valuable part of any feedback programme – it helps them understand what needs to be done to actually improve customer satisfaction. Find out more by downloading our White Paper “The Dangers Of Rewarding Dealers On Their Scores“. By Piers Alington, CEO & Co-Founder

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

The awesomeness of our Text Analytics Lexicon

To download this White Paper, please enter your details below: Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions We'd love to talk to you about your challenges and see how we can help. Send us your details and we'll schedule a call. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions Sign up to receive our thought-provoking, straight-talking, quirky monthly newsletter. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions The awesomeness of the Feedback Ferret Lexicon The Feedback Ferret proprietary Lexicon is the backbone of our Text Analytics engine. It’s what enables our clients to see – at a glance – what their customers are saying. It’s the thing that categorizes everything people say into useful, useable buckets. These categorisations are the building blocks for highly customized and precise topics to meet client requirements to give the insight needed by CX teams, engineering & manufacturing teams, customer service, product development and marketing departments. So why is this important? Because, without precise, granular results, text analytics can be a waste of money. Beware! We are extremely proud of our text analytics engine and how it categorizes comments in a manner that gives real insight to our clients as to what areas of their business need improving. Here are a few facts about our Lexicon: We have over 10,000 categories built into our Lexicon; Within these categories, there are billions of phrase look ups; It’s taken more than 85 man years to develop to date – and the development continues; The Lexicon understands 1,543 different ways of saying something is “Good”; The Lexicon contains 122 variations of the word TOILET (COMMODE – LATRINE – LAV – LITTLE GIRL ROOM – LOO – PORTACABIN – TOILET – WC amongst 116 others!); It has identified 86 ways of spelling “AWESOME”: AAAAAWWWWWEEEEESSSSOOOOOM – AAWESOME – AAWESOMME – ACAAWESOME – AESOME – AEWESOME – AEWSOME – ASWAME – ASWOME – ASWSOM – ATIISF – AURSOME – AUSOME – AUWSUM – AWAESOME – AWASOME – AWE – AWE4SOME – AWEASOME – AWECOME – AWEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSOOOOOMMMMMME – AWEEEEEEESOOOOOOM – AWEERSOME – AWEESOMEEEEE – AWE INSPIRING – AWEINSPIRING – AWEOME – AWEOMSE – AWEQOME – AWERESOME – AWERSOME – AWES0ME – AWESAM – AWESAOME – AWESDOME – AWESEM – AWESEME – AWESENESS – AWESEOME – AWESERSOME – AWESIME – AWESIOME – AWESKME – AWESME – AWESMME – AWESMOE – AWESOE – AWESOIME – AWESOM – #AWESOME – AWESON – AWESONE – AWESONM – AWESOOME – AWESOOOOME – AWESOOOOOOOM – AWESOOOOOOOME – AWESOOOOOOOOOME – AWESOPME – AWESSOM – AWESSOME – AWESSSOOOOOOOOOOOM – AWESUM – AWESUN – AWEWSOM – AWEWSOME – AWNSOME – AWONDERFUL – AWOSAME – AWOSOM – AWOSUM – AWOUSOME – AWQESOME – AWRESIME – AWSAME – AWSEM – AWSEME – AWSEOME – AWSESOME – AWSM – AWSOM – AWSUM – AWWEESSOME – AWWESOME – AWWSOME We could go on and on and on and on telling you about our coding capabilities but we’ll end on that AWESOME note! If you want to find out more about how our Text Analytics can help your business, get in touch! The Feedback Ferret Lexicon Team

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

Closing the loop with your customers is critical

To download this White Paper, please enter your details below: Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions We'd love to talk to you about your challenges and see how we can help. Send us your details and we'll schedule a call. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions Sign up to receive our thought-provoking, straight-talking, quirky monthly newsletter. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions Closing the loop with your customers is critical Fast and instant communication is part of our everyday life these days. Texts, emails, social media – no longer do we wait days for a response, we expect it within hours. And so organisations too must respond quickly to customers who complain because if they don’t, they can expect to see it splashed all over Facebook or Twitter. So what do we do about this? The first step is to ensure you are proactive about asking for feedback and have a robust channel through which your customers can comment or complain. Whether it’s a post purchase feedback form via email or SMS, or a feedback button on your website, make sure customers are given the opportunity to vent any frustrations direct to you before resorting to social media. The second – and arguably most important – step is to ensure you have an effective process for ‘closing the loop’ with customers. This means ensuring that someone reads the complaints soon after you receive it (ideally within minutes), and that a front line member of staff has the authority to contact the respective customer immediately. If the complaint cannot be resolved immediately, at the very least your designated member of staff should be giving the customer a chance to vent their frustrations and empathizing with them. Once the customer feels listened to, he is less prone to an outburst on social media. Finally, whatever the nature of the complaint, the loop with the customer must be closed. This means investigating the cause for the complaint, taking any necessary action to rectify the matter and then contacting the customer again to let him know of the outcome. All this may sound like hard work but it doesn’t have to be. There are customer feedback platforms such as Feedback Ferret that enable you to ask your customers for feedback, see at a glance what customers are saying in real time, and then act on that feedback. Alerts can be sent out to front line staff and unhappy customers can be contacted to ensure a quick resolution of any issue. You would be surprised how delighted unhappy customers can be when they actually receive a response to a complaint. Too many organisations take too long to respond or simply ignore them totally. In today’s era of instant communications, there is no excuse for companies not to respond immediately. The technology is available – it just needs to be harnessed. Prompt complaint resolution not only keeps corporate reputations intact, it can win back unhappy customers into the fold. One of our clients increased their re-booking rates amongst ‘unhappy’ customers by 400% simply by contacting them. Click HERE to read the full story.

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

Improve Customer Experience With Impact Analysis

To download this White Paper, please enter your details below: Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions We'd love to talk to you about your challenges and see how we can help. Send us your details and we'll schedule a call. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions Sign up to receive our thought-provoking, straight-talking, quirky monthly newsletter. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions Using Impact Analysis to make big and quick improvements to customer experience Text Analytics involves several hundred reporting topics in a typical client project. So how do you know where to focus effort to make the biggest and quickest improvements to customer experience? We know that it is not simply the topics that have greatest volumes that are the ones that need to be tackled first. Often these high volume topics can be simply ‘hygiene factors’ – worth knowing about, but not big influencers of customer satisfaction.With Impact Analysis, we uncover what’s really driving your customer loyalty, scores and sentiment, and help you move from insight to prioritisation. Crucially, this allows you to understand what leads customers to either defect from your brand or to saying they would not recommend you in the future. Seeing this information in real time allows you to focus on these key drivers to head off negative experiences and carry out root cause analysis to eliminate these issues. Another key feature of Feedback Ferret’s Impact Analysis modelling is the defection risk score, indicating the likelihood the customer will defect at their next purchase. Ring-fencing these high risk customers allows you to take pre-emptive action to retain their business immediately, from changing products and services, targeting with marketing promotions to working on staff behaviours. Another tool available is Feedback Ferret’s predictive scoring of customer actions, such as making standard complaints to the more serious threats of legal action. The ability to see the topics that are causing these damaging outcomes, combined with a customer risk score is truly powerful. Example: An automotive client was surprised to find that ‘Oil Change’ was among the most significant topics mentioned by customers in terms of brand defection from the Impact Analysis results. By drilling down into this topic, eight key factors leading to dissatisfaction with the oil change process were identified, leading to changes in dealer processes and marketing actions. In summary, Impact Analysis modelling is an automated process applied to every Ferret client database, with the results available throughout the Feedback Ferret hosted platform. This helps you focus your efforts where it will make the biggest difference to your customer and reduce your operational costs. For more information, read our Impact Analysis White Paper or get in touch.

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

A Real Life Example of Poor Customer Experience

As a member of the team at Feedback Ferret, I know all about ‘customer experience‘, ‘customer feedback‘, ‘customer is king’ etc. These current buzz words are what our business is all about. However, it never fails to amaze me that our personal customer experiences with some of our biggest multi national organisations can be so time consuming, arduous and often leave our blood boiling. Take my customer experience with my mobile phone provider this week. I wanted to upgrade my data allowance on my mobile phone package. Simple enough, I thought.  How wrong could I be? My first attempt to contact their customer service department comprised a 20 minute online chat. It took 20 minutes to be connected to someone, to go through security, to establish what I wanted, only to be told that due to “technical issues” my online chat could not be transferred to the upgrades department. I needed to call customer services. Big deep breath. I dialled the number given to me and after pressing all sorts of options buttons, I waited on hold. The music was terrible. Without wanting to sound too middle aged, it was the sort of music a teenager would enjoy listing to. The clarity of the music was also appalling – it was interspersed with static noise abit like when your radio is out of tune. 48 minutes of having my ear drums pounded was quite enough. So I hung up. The next day I thought I’d give the online chat another go. After another 20 minutes of getting through the preliminary questions and security checks , I made it through to the upgrades department. Everything was going swimmingly (despite some appalling spelling and grammatical errors from the sales agent) until suddenly, 38 minutes into the chat and shortly before the details of my upgrade were confirmed, the connection failed. Silence. I waited, expecting a call back (after all they had my phone number!). Nothing. I finally got there on my fourth attempt. After 58 minutes of another online chat (with yet more poor spelling and grammar on the chat), I had made it through umpteen rounds of security questions, agreed to a host of Ts and Cs, and the upgrade had finally been made. Phew. I thought I should give some customer feedback to my provider. After all, being in the customer feedback business, we Ferrets understand that customer feedback leads to business improvements. Doesn’t it? I looked on their  website and saw that the number for complaints was the same one I’d spent 48 minutes on hold to. However, by some miracle, after saying the word “complaint” into their voice recognition service, I was connected to a human being in less than 5 minutes. The sales agent I spoke to (who really could do with some training to improve her telephone manner) took details of my complaint and explained she would be passing it all on to another department who would contact me within 5 days. 5 days? Really? 24 hours later, I received the standard text request for customer feedback. The 6th question was the one that gave me the opportunity to tell them what I needed to tell them. Well, there was no way I could text everything I wanted to say so in my text I asked for someone to call me. I am still waiting for that call from someone who will listen. And empathise. And hopefully someone who will actually take action and DO something about my feedback comments. Don’t let this be your company. Use a robust, end to end customer feedback process to find out what needs improving and do something to make your customers happier. It really does pay dividends. By Nicola Douglas, Head of Sales & Marketing By Nicola Douglas, Head of Sales & Marketing

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

How to get quality customer feedback quickly and easily?

To download this White Paper, please enter your details below: Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions We'd love to talk to you about your challenges and see how we can help. Send us your details and we'll schedule a call. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions Sign up to receive our thought-provoking, straight-talking, quirky monthly newsletter. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions Are you ready to leap into the brave new world of customer feedback? Many companies have never considered any other form of customer feedback tool other than a traditional tick-box survey. You know, one of those epic surveys: “How would you rate the X?” “How would you rate the Y?” “How would you rate the Z?” Such surveys can take 10 – 15 minutes to complete which, considering today’s widespread customer survey fatigue, it’s a wonder they generate any responses at all. So is there an alternative which would return better response rates? Yes, there is. Welcome to the brave new world of customer feedback forms that focus on one rating score followed by open-ended commentary. Here’s an example: more customer friendly (easy, short and quick to complete) and therefore generate better response rates generate more qualitative feedback (which provides much more actionable insight so you can improve your customer experience) And with today’s automated text analysis capabilities, making sense of large volumes of verbatim comments is no longer the onerous task it once was. There is just one sticking point: is your organisation ready to change the way they have always done it? We’ll bet someone in your organisation will say: “how will we compare future performance against past performance if the method of collating feedback is changed?” Here at Feedback we can confidently say that this is probably the biggest barrier to moving to the brave new Ferret world of collecting feedback. HOWEVER, the key issue here is not the comparison of the scores over time, it is what you do with it. Simply measuring the same thing repeatedly month on month and year on year because it gives senior management comfort about ‘consistency’ is hardly a sound basis for improving your business, is it? All insight from customer feedback should be pro-actively used to improve your customer experience and business performance. And for that to happen, you need to know MORE than what scores your customers give. You need to know WHY they gave those scores and then take action to improve your business. If you are considering taking a leap into the brave new world, one thing we can say with certainty: none of our current clients has ever regretted trying the new method. The words we hear all too often are “why didn’t we do this sooner?” By Nicola Douglas, Head of Sales & Marketing By Nicola Douglas, Head of Sales & Marketing

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

When is a dog a dog? When is cool cool?

To download this White Paper, please enter your details below: Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions We'd love to talk to you about your challenges and see how we can help. Send us your details and we'll schedule a call. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions Sign up to receive our thought-provoking, straight-talking, quirky monthly newsletter. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions When is a dog a dog? When is cool cool? Here at Feedback Ferret, we know only too well that training a machine in Natural Language Processing is complex. Thinking about the word “dog”, the machine is given various characteristics that help it detect the fact that a dog is being talked about. For example, ‘barking’, ‘paws’, ‘4 legged’, ‘furry friend’. Thinking about the word “cool”, the characteristics of the word may be ‘not warm’, ‘cold’, ‘temperature’. But what does the machine do when someone comments “this car’s a dog”? Or “the hotel room was really cool”? How does a machine, that has been taught automated rules, understand that in fact the car quality is poor and the hotel room may in fact be rather awesome? This is when humans need to intervene in the automated process and, through rigorous quality control and ongoing updates to the coding of phrases, they can develop and evolve the machine to understand and correctly code ambiguous phrases. Back in 2002, Feedback Ferret created a text analytics solution which understands the words that customers use to express their expectations and experience in a way that had never been possible before. The accuracy of our unique approach to text analytics speak volumes for the “machine + human” approach over 100% automated solutions based on Natural Language Processing. We regularly see very high accuracy rates and clients are often astounded by how our text analytics engine understands and correctly codes complex phrases that appear in their customer feedback. So, if you’re thinking about using text analytics to understand your Voice of Customer comments, make sure you choose a solution that can distinguish between a dog & a dog, and cool & cool. Or why not just contact us? By Martyn Woodison, Senior Analyst By Martyn Woodison, Senior Analyst

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

6 Tips To Avoid Paralysis By Analysis

In today’s world of big data and fancy dashboards, it’s easy to become inundated by so much information that we forget what we’re here for: to create a better customer experience. Instead of taking actions to solve known customer issues, “paralysis by analysis” takes over as we sift through more and more data seeking out the risk-free, completely optimal solution with the very best ROI. “Not everything that counts can be counted; not everything that can be counted counts.” p We forget that while we’re mulling it over, customers continue to struggle with the issue we’re trying to solve. Customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy continue eroding, costing the company money. Sometimes it’s better to take a good-faith action rather than wait for the PERFECT solution, which may never come. Paralysis by analysis is “the state of over-analyzing (or over-thinking) a situation so that a decision or action is never taken, in effect paralyzing the outcome.” This can happen for a number of reasons: You fear making the wrong decision and as a result, avoid making any decision at all; You feel compelled to pick the “perfect” decision, and in doing so, making the decision is delayed until yet more research is done; Sources of data presented during discovery are conflicting, inconclusive, and no clear answers appear; You are torn between many available solutions. You may know or feel that a problem exists. But, when it comes to an organization’s customer feedback, insights from different parts of the business may sometimes tell different stories, and meshing this disparate data into a conclusive picture and course of action is near impossible. Issue discovery may include information generated from “big data” (i.e. transactions, product history, etc.), results from structured survey questions (which often ‘lead’ the customer to an answer in certain ways), and open-ended, top of mind verbatim responses from feedback forms.  Trying to make sense of all this insight can be likened to a hamster in a hamster wheel – you can run all day but never actually get anywhere. At some point, analysing must stop, common sense must prevail and action must be taken. If not, why gather feedback at all? If you frequently experience paralysis by analysis when it comes to your customer feedback programme, here are our top tips to help you get through it: Identify your objective Do you know what your end goal is? Will the decision you make help you achieve that? If it will, take action – make the best decision based on what you know right now. You can always change it later. Set a deadline Give yourself a deadline. Determine the last possible date by which a business decision should be made and stick to it. If this deadline cannot be met for whatever reason, remove it from the decision-making table. If you are having problems coming up with this deadline, remind yourself of the daily impact the bad customer experience is having on your business. What’s that costing you? Get a second opinion A problem shared is a problem halved. Share your thoughts with colleagues as and when it is appropriate. Ask, listen, seek advice. Let them help you make the decision. Beware of “over sharing,” and don’t try to seek out all possible viewpoints as that can often hinder progress on taking action. Don’t get bogged down in details Continually wanting to dive deeper and deeper into an analysis often serves only to delay the decision making. Decide what you need to know to make a decision, retrieve that information and move forward. You can always continue to do research and tweak your decision later. Take small steps Rather than seeing the decision to be made as a one off, consider taking smaller decisions that lead to the bigger one. “Perfect” decisions are almost impossible to make. Pick one option If you are facing a myriad of choices and are not sure which way to turn, just pick one action and take it. At least in this way you have made a decision and the consequences can be evaluated over time. We fully appreciate that when it comes to their Voice of Customer programs, some organizations suffer from data overload and paralysis by analysis. Feedback Ferret is here to help. We automatically analyze and make sense of your customer feedback and tell you, via our reporting tools, exactly what issues are most critical to improving your customer experience. We can’t tell you exactly HOW to solve your customer experience problems, but we can point out the most impactful pain points. It’s up to you to decide when and how to act. For a full demo and to find out more, please get in touch. By Mandy Butters, Voice of Customer Programs Manager

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

Feedback Ferret Provide Best Text Analysis Software

To download this White Paper, please enter your details below: Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions We'd love to talk to you about your challenges and see how we can help. Send us your details and we'll schedule a call. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions Sign up to receive our thought-provoking, straight-talking, quirky monthly newsletter. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions Barely Audible & Best Buy Text analytics isn’t straightforward – but we’ve got it sussed. Consider the phrase “barely audible”. For many of our automotive clients, this phrase is categorised as a negative: “I plugged my phone into the bluetooth system and it was barely audible”. Ie, the Bluetooth system wasn’t enabling the customer to hear their phone = a negative comment. However, for another client, whose business is electronic white goods, this phrase needs to be categorised as a positive: “I switched on my new dishwasher and it was barely audible”. Ie, the dishwasher ran very quietly = a positive comment. Another example we often come across is “Best Buy”. Additional context around this phrase is needed to make sense of it. For example, Feedback Ferret contextual coding would distinguish between these three examples by use of existing Lexicon contextual phrases that would assign these to different Categories:- “I am going to Best Buy for a new laptop” = Categorized as ‘Best Buy (Retailer)’ “This car has been my best buy ever” = Categorized as ‘Purchase Experience – Good’ “This was hardly a best buy in anyone’s language” = Categorized as ‘Purchase Experience – Poor’ So how does the Feedback Ferret text analysis machine, that has been taught automated rules, understand whether phrases such as “barely audible” and “best buy” are positive or negative? It’s all thanks to the “machine + human” approach. Through rigorous quality control and ongoing updates to the coding of phrases, humans intervene in the automated process to develop and evolve the machine to correctly code ambiguous phrases. Our text analytics software is built around a Lexicon of millions of human words and phrases, coded into our system by hand over the last 20 years. We estimate that more than 100 man years of Lexicon coding have been invested to insure that we capture all the ways humans have of describing their experience in a written format. The in-house Lexicon team continually reviews and enhances the Lexicon content every day. This includes bad grammar, colloquialisms, incomplete sentences, misspellings, typos, slang terms, sarcasm, irony and, of course, ambiguous phrases. With accuracy rates over 90%, our clients are often astounded by how the Ferret understands complex phrases that appear in their customer feedback. By Piers Alington, Managing Director

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

Improve customer experience using your staff

“Your front-line staff are your research team” That headline recently stopped me in my tracks. In the Feedback Ferret world of customer feedback, improving customer experience, listening to the voice of customer, I couldn’t help but be struck by the simplicity and obviousness of that headline. I found that headline in Matt Watkinson’s book “The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences”. The subsequent paragraphs read as follows: “On most of the projects I work on there is a requirement for research. We need to get a feel for the territory and get to know as much as possible about customers and the movements of the market. The usual approach is to hire a research consultancy to come in, take a brief, then disappear to report back in a month or two. Most clients also conduct workshops where customers come into the office and voice their opinions. This has always struck me as a bit odd. Surely we have people who are dealing with customers every day in shops, call centres or out on the road? Better still, why aren’t management spending time on the shop floor themselves to develop a rich feel for what’s really going on? Why aren’t software developers working an hour or two a week on the helpdesk so they understand their customers’ frustrations? In the last seven years I have seen a senior manager perform a customer-facing role zero times. Before paying for research, why not make the most of what you’ve got? Get down on the shop floor and ask your staff: they’ll appreciate feeling involved in making improvements. Better still, walk a mile in their shoes and see for yourself. Ask yourself “Are the front-line staff contributing meaningfully to improving our customer experience?” Have you seen your senior managers ever out on the shop floor? Are your front-line staff ever used as a “research team”? Your employees are very often the ones at the coalface of your operations. They are making products and following your business processes. They are talking to customers day in day out. They are up close and personal to the nuts and bolts of your organisation. They see and understand how it operates and – most importantly – they see what works and what doesn’t work. Seeking out, listening to and acting on employees views does not necessarily mean an organisation has to do what its employees want. But it does need to demonstrate that its leadership is listening to its people by inviting feedback and responding to it. In today’s changing landscape for organisations worldwide, engaging customers and employees in the right ways is critical to business success. The two are intrinsically linked – happy, fulfilled and valued customers are easier to deal with and therefore make the lives of service employees that much easier. Happy, fulfilled and valued employees undertake their responsibilities with more enthusiasm and energy and if they are customer-facing, this has a significant knock on effect on customers. “Employee Feedback – are you missing the vital link in the customer experience chain?” is our White Paper on this subject and includes our 7 steps to actively engaging your staff. Check it out and find out why we, like the author of the above article, Matt Watkinson, feel that employees merit a say in the “Customer experience”. Reference taken from “The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences” by Matt Watkinson: By Nicola Douglas, Head of Sales & Marketing

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

Increase Customer Retention Using Feedback

To download this White Paper, please enter your details below: Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions We'd love to talk to you about your challenges and see how we can help. Send us your details and we'll schedule a call. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions Sign up to receive our thought-provoking, straight-talking, quirky monthly newsletter. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions Customers are for life, not just for Christmas Normally we think about dogs in this context but have you ever thought of your customers like that? Looking back on your business in 2019, do you REALLY know your customers? Do you really know WHY they purchase from you? Do you really know WHY they defect to your competitors? The question is, have you ever ASKED them? If not, maybe now’s the time to start finding out. Christmas gives all businesses a great excuse to do something a bit special to make customers happy. Each and every one of your customers is a human being with individual needs, wants and desires. They each have a lifetime of purchasing experience. But how do they react to your products, services, prices, advertising and promotion? How do they perceive their customer experience with your brand? If you don’t have a customer feedback mechanism in place to find this out, all you can do is try to outsmart the competition with yet more discounts. Now is the time to reflect on what you can do better next year. Wouldn’t it be great if, by the time Christmas 2020 comes around, you had all the information you need to ensure your customers enjoy a better customer experience with your business? This would ensure they became advocates of your brand and loyal, lifelong customers. And, increasing customer retention can only be good news for your bottom line. Using our sophisticated Voice of Customer platform, we can tell you what you need to do to improve your customer experience, and customer retention. We help you ask the right questions and get the information you need to take action. We call it “insight on a plate”. To find out more, get in touch. By Nicola Douglas, Head of Sales & Marketing

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

WestJet Christmas - A Priceless Customer Experience

To download this White Paper, please enter your details below: Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions We'd love to talk to you about your challenges and see how we can help. Send us your details and we'll schedule a call. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions Sign up to receive our thought-provoking, straight-talking, quirky monthly newsletter. Your Name Your Email Organisation p Terms and Conditions WestJet Christmas Miracle – a priceless customer experience Although this story is now 6 years old, we still love this heartwarming Christmas story. The customer experience demonstrated by WestJet in this clip is priceless. What makes the customer experience so special? The experience is unique. It is perfectly timed and executed. It is memorable. And it is totally unexpected by the customer. It has all the elements of the ultimate customer experience. Coupled with a brilliant seasonal promotional opportunity, it is a superb example of successful marketing. With over 49 million YouTube hits, it’s worth watching again. By Nicola Douglas, Head of Sales & Marketing

[measurementanalysisinstruments]

Raytheon Work in Tucson

Raytheon Work in Tucson Raytheon Missile Systems, Tucson, Arizona, is being awarded a sole source, cost only contract modification which adds more work. Under this modification, the “pacing items only” restriction is removed and the contractor is now authorized to work the full, unchanged, effort to manufacture, assemble, test and deliver 20 Standard Missile-3 Block IIA missiles and related efforts, and four missiles under Foreign Military Sales (FMS) case JA-P-ATB to Japan. The work will be performed in Tucson, Arizona; and Huntsville, Alabama, with an estimated completion date of December 2022.