posted by Nick Roman on 2/26/2010
Before Christmas last year the social application site RockYou.com suffered a data breach that resulted in the exposure of over 32 million user accounts. In the aftermath of this incident, researchers from Imperva were able to analyze the unsecure practices used by millions when choosing their passwords. If you are wondering what the most popular password is, it is "123456". The next 4 are "12345", "123456789", "Password" (ironic, isn't it?) and "iloveyou".
Read More
posted by Nick Roman on 2/22/2010
When I was served at a well-known chemist chain in London recently, the woman at the checkout felt the need to comment on a number of my purchases (none of which was interesting enough to comment on). I particularly enjoyed “Oh my God! Did you see how much that toothpaste costs? So expensive!” Excellent. Nothing like making the customer feel like she’s either getting ripped off, or she has an outrageously decadent approach to dental hygiene.
Read More
posted by Nick Roman on 2/19/2010
In my last post I touched upon product qualities, which are derived from stakeholder values. This time I would like to go a bit more into details.
We do our best to define our product qualities clear and unambiguous, testable, measurable, and with a clear stakeholder focus.
Read More
posted by Nick Roman on 2/17/2010
I talked briefly about product qualities in my previous post, and I would like to pursue this a bit further. Software products have a set of product qualities attached to them, whether we like it or not! A product/system is more or less: user-friendly, intuitive, productive, maintainable, reliable, scalable, etc. This is not a choice, it’s a fact.
Read More
posted by Nick Roman on 2/16/2010
Most people don’t enjoy calling a contact center. Granted, not everyone hates them, but I don’t know anyone who thinks “Ooh, good. I can call a lovely contact center to sort this out. What a treat!”
Read More
posted by Nick Roman on 2/12/2010
Tim Macer, independent advisor and specialist in the application of technology of market and opinion research, recently made a comment in his blog about the use of in-house developed survey software in MR companies.
Read More
posted by Nick Roman on 2/11/2010
Yesterday I described Sir Martin Sorrell’s (Oct-09) prediction of a "LUV"-shaped global recovery in 2010 - L-shaped for Europe, U-shaped for the US and V-shaped for Asia. I wanted to see whether this forecast was turning out to be correct. Yesterday I reported how Australia, Asia and the Arab Gulf States were successfully recovering from the economic downturn. Today, let’s compare this with the situation and outlook in Europe and the US . . .
Read More
posted by Nick Roman on 2/10/2010
Working with Confirmit partners around the globe, it’s been interesting to observe how different regions of the world have been coming out of the economic downturn of last year. Last October, the IMF predicted global growth for 2010 at 3.1 %. Now this figure has been revised to 3.9 %, so things are certainly looking up, but regionally there will be winners and losers.
Read More
posted by Nick Roman on 2/9/2010
In my job, I travel rather often, which means that I’m inundated with requests for feedback on my hotel stays. Partly because I work for a feedback management vendor, and partly because I believe that done well, these programs work, I tend to respond to the request.
Read More
posted by Nick Roman on 2/8/2010
When thinking about how to increase business-wide adoption of online reporting tools, there are many factors that can make a difference in increasing usage to a diverse audience. Addressing aspects such as the clarity of actionable information, creating a user experience appropriate for the capabilities of the specific audience, and engaging users to explore the data further are just a few areas that spring to mind.
Read More
posted by Nick Roman on 2/5/2010
We always talk about how great it is to be able to react quickly to customer feedback. When Mrs. Customer tells you she’s had a poor experience, it’s great to call her back to resolve the issue. You’ve made the customer happy, and potentially pinpointed a way to improve training or processes to prevent it from happening again. Complaints, in many ways, rock.
Read More
posted by Nick Roman on 2/4/2010
When Confirmit Horizons was first launched in January 2009, it was widely acknowledged that the platform combined two best-of-breed systems to create a feature-rich solution answering the many and varied survey and feedback requirements of enterprises and Market Research agencies.
Read More
posted by Nick Roman on 2/3/2010
The few software conferences I have attended over the last year have focused a lot on Scrum. Scrum is an agile software development method used by an increasing number of software companies. Scrum talks about a “sprint”, which is a potentially shippable product increment.
Read More
posted by Nick Roman on 2/2/2010
In a very interesting blog post, Ginger Conlon of 1to1 Media discussed a situation in which she was fired as a customer for being potentially unprofitable. While Ginger understood the reasons that the insurer terminated her business, she questioned whether the publicity fallout and negative word-of-mouth made the decision worthwhile.
Read More
posted by Nick Roman on 2/1/2010
I’ve been recently pondering about whether to buy an eBook reader, like the Amazon Kindle DX . It is undoubtedly a clever use of technology; it is slimmer than a book, it can hold the equivalent content of several thousand books, I can download new titles on the move, and it ends the age-old problem of the bookmark dropping out from between the pages.
Read More