Why Mindshare? - Glossary
Glossary
A Sense of Urgency: The reputation carried by Mindshare's professionals. Urgency! Responsive! Passionate!
Actionable: Data you can use to improve your business practices.
Automated Surveys: Surveys that automatically capture and report actionable customer feedback.
Balanced Scorecard: A compilation of metrics showing results across the major areas of a company's performance. Most companies using the balanced scorecard include the following three basic metrics – financial performance, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction. Depending on the company and industry, additional metrics are often added to the balanced scorecard including: cost efficiency, competitive position, learning, growth, and leadership.
Bald Men: Follicly challenged. A demographic that is somehow way over-represented in the Mindshare population. Interesting Bible story about it. Decent joke: (Q: Why do bald men have no use for keys? A: Because they've lost their locks.)
Brand Touch Points: All of the ways in which your customers, employees, and partners come in contact with your brand.
CallCenter: Centralized location used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by phone. (Sometimes called a Contact Center, which technically incorporates other methods of communicating with customers, such as e-mail, IVR, letters, etc.)
ContactCenter: (See Call Center.)
Continuously: How often companies should be listening to their customers. (The opposite of this word is "statistical sampling," or "mystery shops.") Customers don't experience your service sporadically, why should they only be able to give you feedback sporadically? Take a movie, not a snapshot!
Consistency: Great service every time.
Convenient: Mindshare's reporting. Receive pre-scheduled reports as often as you wish, or log on to the web 24/7 from anywhere. Cross-tab filters at your disposal. Charts, graphs, trends, etc. Click here for a peek.
Cornell: An Ivy League University in Ithaca, New York. The premier hospitality school in the United States. They know service. Our President, Rich Hanks taught sales and marketing there for 10 years.
Costco Run: Quick trip to local Costco to load up on all the major food groups (soda, candy, chips, Swedish fish, trail mix) to keep late-working dedicated Mindshare employees hydrated and full of sugar.
Cost-Effective: Great price-value. Mindshare's goal in pricing our products for our clients. We strive to provide a price point that is difficult to match.
CRM: Customer Relationship Management is at the heart of trying to understand and track each customer's wants, needs, and preferences over time. But what are 95% of CRM systems missing? The actual customer experience! Many companies have built elaborate CRM systems that tell them all about a customer's history, and their likes and dislikes, but do not tell them if customers got what they expected from their most recent experience. Never mistake CRM for real-time customer feedback.
Customer-Centric Organization: An organization that encourages customer service to permeate the decisions and attitudes of the entire company.
Customer Experience: The way in which a customer comes in contact with your product or service, using all five senses. The perfect customer experience is one which results in customers becoming advocates for the company, creating referrals, retention, and profitable growth.
Customer Loyalty: The totality of attitudes, emotions, and behavior that incline a customer to consider the re-purchase of a particular product, service or brand or re-visit a particular company, shop or website. We believe that loyalty can be simply defined by its outcomes – "Share of Wallet, share of Mind, share of Mouth." (Rich Hanks)
Customer Retention: Occurs when a customer is loyal to a company, brand, or to a specific product or service, expressing long-term commitment, and driving preference. Much, much cheaper than Customer Acquisition. (Hang on to the ones you've got before you go looking for others!)
Customer Service: A series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction - that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.
Customizable: A solution tailored specifically for you. Like Mindshare.
Death Trap: Any car that our COO, Brad Clark, drives to work.
Demo: A free overview of the benefits of Mindshare's proprietary technology. Click here to see it.
Easy-to-use: Around-the-clock online report access with simple login.
Employee Satisfaction: A major factor leading to employee loyalty and productivity, which then impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty. Also a major product offering from Mindshare, which measures how employees feel about the companies they work for and their roles within them.
Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM): Consolidating and managing feedback from all touch-points. Forward-thinking companies have consolidated multiple sources of feedback into an integrated solution that provides single-source reporting, showing all feedback from customers, employees, vendors, and partners, regardless of where they "touch" the company. Mindshare is the premier EFM solutions provider – offering the best solutions, which not only help our clients manage ALL feedback, but also takes the additional steps of providing accountability, follow-up, incident management, and service-lapse recovery tools.
Flexibility: Surveys and reports that are easily modified to meet your changing needs.
Fly-by: Technical term for Sperry's horizontal flying by a window. Makes you feel like you're in an airplane, and he is flying alongside the plane – outside.
Hana Time: The name of Rich's wooden clock he built from scratch. See a video of it here.
Hosted Solution: Software delivered online, as compared to software installed on local computers. Much better way to deliver technology solutions. Each individual Mindshare client receives the benefit of best practices and technology ideas from our total set of clients. And, not to worry, the system (and your data) is totally safe and secure. Mindshare builds redundancies into its hosted solutions to minimize downtime or inconvenience to our clients.
Instant Alert Notification: We'll notify you immediately whenever survey responses on key metrics fall below acceptable parameters.
Internet: A marvelous place to share information, take surveys, and have an overall jolly good time. However, be careful, it can also be a distribution channel where your customers can tell the world about your service – good or bad!
IVR: Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is an automated telephony system that interacts with callers, gathers information, and routes calls to the appropriate recipient. An IVR system accepts a combination of voice input and touch-tone keypad selection and provides appropriate responses in the form of voice, fax, callback, e-mail and perhaps other media. Mindshare has invested over $7.5 Million dollars to perfect a purpose-built application that surpasses typical IVR technology. Because of this, our customers no longer have to settle for antiquated, traditional IVR technology.
Joke Books: A fun way to connect with our clients and prospects, while letting them know that we don't take ourselves too seriously. You can download the online versions of our joke books here. If you have a great joke, be sure and submit it!
Lipstick on a Pig: "Making something look better than it is." A friendly warning to our clients and potential clients… please make sure you truly evaluate your service providers. We are constantly amazed at the features and benefits our competitors CLAIM they have, until they are really pushed to DEMONSTRATE them. We don't put lipstick on anything. What you see is what you get. If we can't do something (yet) we tell you. If we say we can, we can.
Million: The approximate number of surveys Mindshare administers each month.
Mindshare Technologies: The leading provider of real-time, automated customer and employee feedback solutions.
Moon Dog Mayne: The father of Lonnie Mayne, Mindshare's EVP of Sales. The "Golden Bomber" was a professional wrestler in the 1960s and 1970's who frequently went by the name Moon Dog Mayne. No cauliflower ears on Lonnie, though.
Multi-Unit Companies: Companies with more than one location, such as franchisees or national chains.
Mystery Shopper: An incomplete way of measuring service in retail shopping environments. Performed by third-parties who are pretending to be customers.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): An aggressive method of scoring survey responses that gauges the loyalty of a firm's customer relationships. By asking customers one question ("How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?") customers can be categorized into three groups: promoters, passives, and detractors. From these, the Net Promoters (promoters minus detractors) can be calculated. NPS is sometimes linked to asking only one question. The NPS scoring method has strong predictive value, with additional pros and cons. Asking only one question is not recommended. (See Ultimate Question)
Platinum Rule of Customer Service: "Do unto others as they would have you do unto them." Think about it.
Portillo: A world-class snow skiing destination in Chile with a very clever rope tow and all the vertical feet you can handle.
Real Customers: Let your front-line associates hear the feelings and emotions of actual customers, not third-parties pretending to be customers.
Real People: How we see ourselves. How we see our clients. It's not all just about work, it's also about relationships. Hey, if there's an earthquake today, we're all under the table together, and all the titles, airs, human obstacles would disappear, right.
Real-Time: Information and improvement now, right now!
Recession: One of the best times for service companies to steal market share. When economic downturns hit, too many companies, faced with needing to cut costs, mistakenly choose to cut areas that impact customer service. Wise companies recognize that a recession is one of the best times to demonstrate commitment to customers and win them over to your company.
Relationships Augmented by Technology: (Rich Hanks) How we view our connection to our clients.
Reports: (See Convenient)
Robear: The alternative name you give to your very talented graphic designer, when it gets confusing because you have too many other "Roberts" on staff.
Simplicity: Nothing to install and no software to implement. With our hosted, web-based model you are "up and running" in hours.
Speed: Capture the customer experience in real time (not old, stale reports)
The "Mighty 32": Represents the backbone of highly-devoted, service-minded Mindshare employees who built the company. The original eight worked for years with no salaries. The term "Mighty 32" was coined by a potential client during the final stages of an RFP. She couldn't believe our system and our people could deliver so much more than the other competitors, some of whom were 30 times our size. She asked, "And who will do this, you and your mighty 32 employees?" We won the RFP, and the nickname "Mighty 32" was born. T-Shirts included.
"Ultimate Question": Some consultant's attempt to make feedback appear simple so that it would appeal to the masses and sell books. There are no short-cuts in gathering customer feedback. Asking one "ultimate question" will provide you with only one "ultimate answer." Instead, you should ask enough diagnostic questions to ascertain actions needed to improve. You should ask the "Would you recommend us..." question, just don't be fooled into thinking that that is the ONLY question you should ask. (Also, see NPS – a scoring method often confused with asking just one question.)
Unit-level: Where problems can best be resolved. Poor service experiences happen at the unit-level. So, that is where the feedback should be directed, because that is where the problems can best be resolved. Local managers should be held accountable for (1) recovering a customer, and (2) fixing the person or process that needs to be improved.
Viking: John Sperry's alter ego and family line. Also called Norseman or Northman, refers to a member of the Scandinavian seafaring traders, warriors and pirates who raided and colonized wide areas of Europe from the 9th to the 11th century and reached east to Russia and Constantinople.
Volume: Glean feedback from hundreds of customers each month, not one or two mystery shops.
Webinar: A convenient way for you to learn about Mindshare's solutions without having to leave your office.
