What drives customer propensity to recommend a brand?

This paper investigates the drivers of customer propensity to recommend a brand. DFS, a leading UK retailer, has provided Staffordshire University with access to its large data set of responses to customer satisfaction surveys. We use the Net Promoter Score methodology to differentiate between different levels of customer loyalty (i.e. “detractors”, “passive” and “promoters”). We then use a logistic regression model to determine what influences the likelihood of a customer becoming a “promoter”. We use factor analysis to reduce the large number of survey questions to a manageable number of explanatory variables. The most important factors identified are (i) satisfaction with product quality, (ii) satisfaction with the sales experience and (iii) the ability of the company to exceed customers’ expectations. We find that the law of diminishing returns applies; i.e., when average satisfaction is already high, management should expect lower returns on investment in additional improvements. In addition, we find that satisfaction is a better predictor of true loyalty than previous purchase

The Baby Boom and later life: is critical care fit for the future?

Populations around the world are ageing while in many developed countries the proportion of elderly patients admitted to critical care is rising. It is clear that age alone should not be used as a reason for refusing intensive care admission. Critical care in this patient group is challenging in many ways: with advancing age, several physiological changes occur which all lead to a subsequent reduction of physical performance and compensatory capacity, in many cases additionally aggravated by chronic illness. Subsequently, these age-dependent changes (with or without chronic illness) increase the risk for death, treatment costs and a prolonged length of intensive care and hospital stay. This review explores the potential of using co-morbidity and frailty to predict outcome and to help to make better decisions about critical care admission in the elderly. The authors explore the challenges of using different frailty assessment tools and offer a model for holistic approach to answer these questions

The Effect of The Net Promoter Score on Sales: A Study of a Retail Firm Using Customer and Store-Level Data

Existing industry-level evidence does not inform practitioners about when and by how much sales will grow as a result of an increase in NPS. We investigate the relationship between sales and NPS for a leading retail firm by combining individual stores’ monthly sales data with data from customer satisfaction surveys from which we calculate NPS for every UK store in every month over a four-year period. We find nonlinear sales effects of (i) stores’ own NPS and (ii) the average NPS of the other stores of the same company in the same region. Both NPS effects on stores’ sales at first increase and then decrease over the five to 10 months after the product purchases to which the NPS refers. If every store could achieve a sustained increase in its NPS of one percentage point, then across all UK stores the additional annual sales would be around £3 million

Combining Functional and Structural Reasoning for Safety Analysis of Electrical Designs

Increasing complexity of design in automotive electrical systems has been paralleled by increased demands for analysis of the safety and reliability aspects of those designs. Such demands can place a great burden on the engineers charged with carrying out the analysis. This paper describes how the intended functions of a circuit design can be combined with a qualitative model of the electrical circuit that ful®ls the functions, and used to analyse the safety of the design. FLAME, an automated failure mode and e€ects analysis system based on these techniques, is described in detail. FLAME has been developed over several years, and is capable of composing an FMEA report for many di€erent electrical subsystems. The paper also addresses the issue of how the use of functional and structural reasoning can be extended to sneak circuit analysis and fault tree analysis.

House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee Session 2012-13, Forensic Science, Minutes of Evidence HC 930-ii, Oral Evidence, 6th February 2013

House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee Session 2012-13, Forensic Science, Minutes of Evidence HC 930-ii, Oral Evidence, 6th February 201

Measuring adherence in social recovery therapy with people with first episode psychosis

Background:The SUPEREDEN3 study, a phase II randomized controlled trial, suggests that social recovery therapy (SRT) is useful in improving functional outcomes in people with first episode psychosis. SRT incorporates cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) techniques with case management and employment support, and therefore has a different emphasis to traditional CBT for psychosis, requiring a new adherence tool.Aims:This paper describes the SRT adherence checklist and content of the therapy delivered in the SUPEREDEN3 trial, outlining the frequency of SRT techniques and proportion of participants who received a full therapy dose. It was hypothesized that behavioural techniques would be used frequently, consistent with the behavioural emphasis of SRT.Method:Research therapists completed an adherence checklist after each therapy session, endorsing elements of SRT present. Data from 1236 therapy sessions were reviewed to determine whether participants received full, partial or no therapy dose.Results:Of the 75 participants randomized to receive SRT, 57.3% received a full dose, 24% a partial dose, and 18.7% received no dose. Behavioural techniques were endorsed in 50.5% of sessions, with cognitive techniques endorsed in 34.9% of sessions.Conclusions:This report describes an adherence checklist which should be used when delivering SRT in both research and clinical practice. As hypothesized, behavioural techniques were a prominent feature of the SRT delivered in SUPEREDEN3, consistent with the behavioural emphasis of the approach. The use of this adherence tool would be considered essential for anyone delivering SRT looking to ensure adherence to the model

Testing in the incremental design and development of complex products

Testing is an important aspect of design and development which consumes significant time and resource in many companies. However, it has received less research attention than many other activities in product development, and especially, very few publications report empirical studies of engineering testing. Such studies are needed to establish the importance of testing and inform the development of pragmatic support methods. This paper combines insights from literature study with findings from three empirical studies of testing. The case studies concern incrementally developed complex products in the automotive domain. A description of testing practice as observed in these studies is provided, confirming that testing activities are used for multiple purposes depending on the context, and are intertwined with design from start to finish of the development process, not done after it as many models depict. Descriptive process models are developed to indicate some of the key insights, and opportunities for further research are suggested