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Increasingly, the CEO’s of all the progressive organizations are focusing on customer experience as a competitive business differentiator. If not already, it should be high on the list of every company aspiring to be successful. Need some convincing? Take a look at the following 25 inspiring and useful customer service quotes as said by CEO’s of company we all admire:

1. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”- Bill Gates
   This quote resonates well for a growing organization as customers should be the source of all learning and innovation in an enterprise.
2. “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” –Charles Darwin
   I love the way how Charles Darwin has simply explained one of the most important concepts in the history of human evolution. This applies very well to business evolution.
3. “Well done is better than well said.” –Benjamin Franklin
   As described in this quote, the importance of successful execution cannot be undermined and understated.
4. “Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face. You’d be amazed how many companies don’t listen to their customers.” –Ross Perot
   It’s a great quote that addresses a big concern that needs to be fixed by large organizations, if they want to maintain their edge in the future.
5. “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”
   -Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com
   Amazon is a pioneer in customer experience and clearly outlines its marketing edge – word of mouth driven by happy customers
6. “The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.” –Jerry Gregoire, CIO, Dell Computers
   Today customer experience is a key differentiating factor for a large number of commodity products.
7. “Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.”
   -Peter Drucker
   Quality of a product needs to be seen and defined from the eyes of the customer. Customer should be able to experience the value and the quality and decide its worthiness.
8. “Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.” –Donald Porter, V.P. British Airways
   This clearly defined the new customers of the current era. Customers understand that companies are made of people/ humans and want to connect with them and get help when they need it the most.
9. “The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.” –John Russell, President, Harley Davidson
   It is absolutely true that staying close to the customers would always help an organization learn and adapt to compete effectively.
10. “You’ll never have a product or price advantage again. They can be easily duplicated, but a strong customer service culture can’t be copied.” –Jerry Fritz
    We all understand that true strategic advantage is difficult to imitate. Customer service is one of those things that can deliver strong competitive advantage. We all know the examples of Apple, Southwest airlines etc.
11. “In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.” –Doug Warner
    We should remember that we live in a digital era and customers have a lot of choice when it comes to making speedy online decisions. It is inevitable to have a strong online presence for any successful business.
12. “Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet.” –Kevin Stirtz
    This is where the rubber meets the road. It is important for a company to know its strengths and understand its customers to deliver a successful product.
13. “Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.” –Chip Bell, Founder Chip Bell Group
    This is the reason why businesses want loyal customers. Apple has done a great job at this.
14. “Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.” –Anonymous
    Today, customer service is a differentiator for a business and it cannot be left only in the hands of the customer representatives. Everyone in the company should have an ear and an eye for improving customer experience.
15. “When people talk about successful retailers and those that are not so successful, the customer determines at the end of the day who is successful and for what reason.” –Jerry Harvey
    The ultimate power lies in the hands of the customers and they are responsible for making a product/ service successful.
16. “A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.” –Steve Jobs
    Apple is a symbol of customer focused innovation and great customer experience. This is something that competition and businesses should understand and learn from.
17. “You’ve got to look for a gap, where competitors in a market have grown lazy and lost contact with the readers or the viewers.” –Rupert Murdoch
    Competitive research should focus on the customer experience gaps to innovate and differentiate on new and existing products.
18. “Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.” –Tom Peters
    Change is the true underdog that if done correctly can lead to success and profit.
19. “Every contact we have with a customer influences whether or not they’ll come back. We have to be great every time or we’ll lose them.” –Kevin Stirtz
    This is the new normal for today’s customer. And, this needs to be followed to sustain the customer base.
20. “Here is a simple but powerful rule: always give people more than what they expect to get.” –Nelson Boswell
    This has been widely tested and understood, but difficult to follow and execute. But, if done right, it always pays off.
21. “Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business.” –Zig Ziglar
    Data is true and statisticians are helpful. A complaining customer is giving you one more chance to improve before he leaves you and goes to the competitor. So, do listen to him and help him.
22. “Every client you keep, is one less that you need to find.” –Nigel Sanders
    This is the mantra to maintaining your growth and profitability.
23. “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends” –Jeff Bezos
    The new digital world comes with its own benefits and disadvantages and an unhappy digitally savvy customer is the last thing a business wants.
24. “If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting.” –Stephen Covey
    Great quote to describe the needs for change in this changing world.
25. “We don’t want to push our ideas on to customers, we simply want to make what they want.” –Laura Ashley
    This is another quote that tells the power of the customers and the need to stay close to them to learn, innovate and provide them what they want. This is a win win for everyone.

I loved writing this blog and hope that you enjoy reading it.

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PALO ALTO, California — June 18, 2015 — Maana, a pioneer in search engine technology for big-data-fueled solutions, today announced it has successfully built its industry agnostic, end-to-end search and discovery platform on Apache® Spark™. Spark enables Maana to perform massive-scale processing for machine learning and data mining. With Spark, Maana successfully overcomes the limitations of Hadoop’s MapReduce framework, especially with regard to performance and integration.

“Maana is the first and only big data search engine powered by Spark. Switching to Spark was a business decision we didn’t take lightly, and afterwards we never looked back,” said Babur Ozden, founder and CEO of Maana.

Maana runs natively on Spark and uses its in-memory caching, which enables Maana to re-use parts of the computation. The in-memory caching is designed to increase application performance by holding frequently requested data in memory, reducing the need for database queries to get that data.

“Maana has been running on Spark for over a year and a half. For Maana, working with extremely large technical datasets from numerous different sources requires both speed and sophisticated analysis. We weren’t getting the results with Hadoop MapReduce v1. Spark, the industry standard, is easier to use and the best alternative to the more exotic solutions available,” said Donald Thompson, founder and CTO of Maana. “The growing ecosystem around Spark allows our data scientists and our customers to use the languages and tools they are already familiar with.”

About Maana

Maana is pioneering new search technology for big data. It helps corporations drive significant improvements in productivity, efficiency, safety, and security in the operations of their core assets. Investors include: Chevron Technology Ventures, ConocoPhillips Technology Ventures, Frost Data Capital, GE Ventures, and Intel Capital. Maana is privately held with offices in Palo Alto, California and Bellevue, Washington. Visit us at www.maana.io.

To read the original press release on Maana, click here.

Originally Posted at: The First and Only – Big Data Search Engine Powered by Apache® Spark™

Have you ever found yourself in a flux chasing after websites, agents, travel blogs, coupons to find your great travel deal? I am no different and spend good chunk of hours on travel deal hunting. I came across this amazing video by Jason Cochran on WalletPop.com, Jason walks us through easy to follow steps, helping us get to that great travel deal faster. Hope these tips will help you get to your travel-deal faster as well. These are great suggestions, I have been using few of them myself, and they work great.

Let me know if there are any other tips/tricks that you use and are not covered in the video below.

Source: Tips To Hunt For That Great Travel Deal

In the push for more revenue growth, Twitter has been building up its business in areas like advertising and commerce, but a move made late Friday night points to another area where the company is setting its sights: big data analytics.

Twitter announced that it will be terminating agreements with third parties for reselling firehose data — the unfiltered, full stream of Tweets and all related metadata that goes along with them.

Instead, it will use its own in-house big data analytics team, which it developed around its acquisition of Gnip in 2014, to seek to build direct relationships with the data companies, brands and others that use Twitter data to measure consumer sentiment, market trends and other moving targets that can be better understood by tracking online conversations — a transition it says it hopes to have completed by mid-August.

DataSift, the biggest company to be affected by Twitter’s move, services thousands of businesses who in turn serve thousands more. Unsurprisingly it moved quickly to post its own reaction to the termination and its own determination to push ahead in its own business.

NTT Data, which deals only in Japanese Tweets, is still listed as a Twitter firehose partner at the time of writing, but Twitter has confirmed to me that NTT is also affected by Friday’s announcement.

This is both a very unsurprising and sudden move, from the looks of it.

Talking to Nick Halstead, the CEO and founder of DataSift, he said that his company was “blindsided” by Twitter’s announcement, which it made without any warning to DataSift. He said that before this, the pair had been discussing a renewal of the deal. And while DataSift recently added Facebook — Twitter’s big social advertising competitor — as a firehose partner, it didn’t appear that this would impact those discussions.

“We were in the middle of negotiations with everything pointing to Twitter wanting to still continue to be a part of an open ecosystem,” he said, “but this is clearly now not true.”

On the other hand, for those who have been following how Twitter has grown as a business, the company’s move to cut off third-party firehose relationships should come as no surprise.

The company has made no secret of its bigger philosophy about how it interfaces with third parties in general. In its (in)famous ‘quadrant’ diagram, the company outlined its position towards third parties that added value to what Twitter was doing versus those that effectively overlapped with Twitter’s own efforts: those who were building Twitter clients that “mimic” Twitter’s own experience in reproducing the Twitter stream were getting cut off.

You can think of last year’s move by Twitter to acquire Gnip — another firehose reseller who competed with DataSift — as a step Twitter was taking to move its interests into one more area of that quadrant.

At the time the acquisition was seen mainly as a response to Apple’s acquisition of Topsy, who had been another firehose partner. And DataSift went so far as to reassure people that its status with Twitter would not be affected. But now it’s clear that Twitter had other things in mind, too.

Zach Hofter-Shall, head of Twitter ecosystem, said as much in his blog post late Friday:

In fact, whether they wanted to believe it or not, these companies were told by Twitter that they would be getting cut off nearly a year ago, we understand.

The direct relationships Twitter has with data customers, meanwhile, are also starting to take a new kind of form. Just last month, Twitter made its first investment in a startup through its new investment vehicle. The recipient? Dataminr, one of the companies that analyses Twitter firehose data, in its case to track news and financial data.

The reason why Twitter wants to tap into more big data business, of course, comes down to one big reason: money.

Since going public, Twitter has regularly faced questions about user growth. On one hand, that has led it to many iterations as it tries to snag more consumers who are not already regular Twitter users. On the other, it has increasingly focused on ways that it can better monetise what it already has.

That’s where the big-data services come in. Twitter’s data firehose, from what we understand, makes up a relatively small portion of DataSift’s revenues. The company makes 20% of its revenues from licensing data, with that data including Twitter but also more than 20 other networks. The remaining 80% comes from data processing.* Cutting off the firehose to DataSift, Twitter hopes, will potentially give it access to (and better returns on) the customer deals that DataSift held before.

(The big question now will be whether Twitter manages to convince enough of the people who used to buy data through DataSift to turn directly to Twitter for those needs instead.)

“Twitter believes that creating a closed market for their data allows them to generate more revenue,” Halstead told TechCrunch. “We believe and others believe that an open ecosystem is important for a brand to understand what is going on in the market.”

As for where DataSift is turning next, the company says it is signing on more social networks to provide its own firehose data feeds. No comment from DataSift on which feed will be next, but it’s notable LinkedIn is not yet a partner. The social network for the working world is clearly looking for more ways of using its data for analytics, and this seems an obvious route to do that.

DataSift is also still able to work with Twitter data: if a third party buys data from Twitter, it can supply it to DataSift by way of a “connector” so that it can still be parsed by DataSift’s algorithms. However, this will mean significantly lower revenues for DataSift in the process from that feed. And  armed with its Facebook deal and other developments in the pipeline, DataSift is pressing ahead with business. The company is currently in the process of raising a new round of funding — a Series D round. To date, DataSift has raised nearly $78 million.

Update: Mark Suster writes that DataSift returns 95% of data revenue back to Twitter. The 20/80 ratio we were describing referred to revenues from data firehose licensing versus data processing revenues for DataSift. We’ve updated the passage above to clarify this.

Originally posted via “Twitter Cuts Off DataSift To Step Up Its Own Big Data Business”

Originally Posted at: Twitter Cuts Off DataSift To Step Up Its Own Big Data Business by analyticsweekpick

Here’s the latest in health and biotech analytics:

Potential for wide-scale whole-genome sequencing in humans using nanopore approaches: Researchers have recently sequenced an entire human genome using Oxford Nanopore’s hand-held MinION devices. These instruments cost less than $1000 plus consumables, and have the potential to change the economics of sequencing.

Advanced Plan for Health Upgrades Next-Generation Predictive Analytics On Poindexter Population Health Management Platform: The platform currently assigns broad risk scores to patients based on demographic data. Now, the company claims to be able to predict the likelihood of specific catastrophic illnesses.

Can Blockchain Give Healthcare Payers Better Analytical Insight?: Jennifer Resnick summarizes a report from Deloitte on the technology. Potential uses include reducing overhead, detecting fraud, and managing provider directories.

Health Tech 2016: A Year To Recalibrate: David Shaywitz writes about the apparent gap between the promise of personalized medicine and actual progress. He understands that new techniques need to actually show real-world value, yet also sees the need for optimism as an impetus for advancement

Originally Posted at: December 12, 2016 Health and Biotech analytics news roundup by pstein

Patient experience (PX) has become an important topic for US hospitals. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will be using patient feedback about their care as part of their reimbursement plan for acute care hospitals (see Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) program). According to QualityNet, the purpoase of the VBP program is to promote better clinical outcomes for patients and improve their experience of care during hospital stays. Not surprisingly, hospitals are focusing on improving the patient experience to ensure they receive the maximum of their incentive payments. But what is the cost of a good patient experience? Does increased hospital spending on medical services translate into a better patient experience?

Medicare Spending Per Beneficiary (MSPB)

Medicare tracks how much they spend on each patient with Medicare who is admitted to a hospital compared to the amount Medicare spends per hospital patient nationally. Also known as “Medicare Spending per Beneficiary (MSPB)”, this measure assesses the cost of care. By measuring cost of care with this measure, CMS hopes to increase the transparency of care for consumers and recognize hospitals that are involved in the provision of high-quality care at lower cost to Medicare.

The MSPB measure for each hospital is calculated as the ratio of the MSPB Amount for the hospital divided by the median MSPB Amount across all hospitals. A hospital with an MSPB value of 1.o indicates that the hospital’s spending per patient is average. A hospital with an MSPB value less than 1.0 indicates that the hospital’s spending per patient is less than the average hospital. A hospital with an MSPB value greater than 1.0 indicates that the hospital’s spending per patient is greater than the average hospital.

Patient Experience

Patient experience (PX) reflects the patients’ perceptions about their recent inpatient experience. PX is collected by a survey known as HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems). HCAHPS (pronounced “H-caps“) is a national, standardized survey of hospital patients and was developed by a partnership of public and private organizations and was created to publicly report the patient’s perspective of hospital care.

The survey asks a random sample of recently discharged patients about important aspects of their hospital experience. The data set includes patient survey results for over 3800 US hospitals on ten measures of patients’ perspectives of care (e.g., nurse communication, pain well controlled). I combined two general questions (Overall hospital rating and recommend) to create a patient advocacy metric. Thus, a total of 9 PX metrics were used. Across all 9 metrics, hospital scores can range from 0 (bad) to 100 (good). You can see the PX measures for different US hospital here.

The Relationship Between Medicare Spend and Patient Loyalty/Experience

Hospitals were divided into 10 groups based on their MSPB score. Figure 1 contains the plot of patient advocacy for each of the 10 MSPB levels. Figure 2 contains the plot of patient experience ratings for each of the 10 MSPB levels.

There were statistically significant differences across the 10 segments.  Although these differences were statistically significant, the differences were not substantial. Specifically, the MSPB segments accounted for about 4.5% of the variance in patient metrics.

We might expect hospitals that spend more on medical services per patient would receive higher patient experience ratings. The patients are, after all, receiving more resources directed toward them compared to hospitals who spend less on medical services. If anything, we see that as the cost of care goes up, patient experience actually decreases (however slightly).

Improving Patient Loyalty and the Patient Experience

One possible approach to understand patient experience/loyalty differences across hospitals is to understand how hospitals build their patient experience (PX) programs. How mature is their PX program? Do they even have a PX program? In other industries, we know that loyalty leading companies structure their customer experience programs differently than loyalty lagging companies (see Figure 3). Specifically, loyalty leaders: 1) have top executive support of the customer program, 2) communicate all aspects of the program throughout the company and 3) integrate their customer feedback with other business data for deep dive customer research. I suspect these same processes (or something similar) are key to a successful PX program (e.g., high patient loyalty and patient experience) in the hospital setting. But that is an empirical question.

Source: A Good Patient Experience Does not Start with Medical Spending