Midwest Airlines focuses on customer service far beyond the in-flight chocolate chip cookies. Midwest Air Group Inc., the Oak Creek-based parent company of Midwest Airlines, has a Customer Experience Index, which consists of monthly results from customer surveys and operational data.
The Customer Experience Index is communicated company-wide to inform every employee of the customer service performance for each month, according to Alketa Voshtina, a market research and product development analyst for the company.
“Excellent customer service is a priority for us, and so we watch this index very carefully,” Voshtina said.
Midwest Airlines started using Ioxphere, an online survey software program developed by Xorbix Technologies Inc., a Milwaukee-based software consulting firm, about two years ago. The airline company had used customer surveys for customer feedback for years but was attracted to Ioxphere’s ease of use and flexibility.
“Ioxphere is user-friendly, intuitive, simple. Using it does not require any technical knowledge or skills beyond basic computer skills,” Voshtina said. “It is very easy. Anyone can use it.”
Ioxphere enables a user to create a survey by choosing the layout and design from a series of font, color and theme choices; store survey questions in a template library; send a survey to an e-mail list through an integrated mail system or by creating a link on the Ioxphere Web site; see live results of the survey; and customize the results in question and answer, chart or graph form for publication.
“Ioxphere is saving us an estimate of 70 percent survey building time,” Voshtina said. “With Ioxphere, you can build the survey entirely within the software, whereas before we had to build a survey template in HTML outside the software, which was very time consuming.”
Voshtina particularly benefits from the availability of live results and the ability to e-mail results pages to third parties, she said.
Midwest Airlines sends out two to three surveys per month, Voshtina said. The surveys are mainly going to customers so that the company can meet and exceed customer expectations. Midwest Airlines occasionally sends surveys to its employees.
“Customer surveys help us measure our performance towards that goal,” Voshtina said. “Via surveys, we also investigate how customers value our current products and offerings.”
Midwest Airlines uses results from ad hoc surveys that request feedback on the company’s products, including Best Care Cuisine in-flight meals and the Midwest MasterCard to design products that meet customer expectations and needs.
“It is a complete solution,” said Asif Bakar, president of Xorbix.
Ioxphere is hosted on Xorbix servers, and each user receives a user account. The survey software is subscription-based, and prices depend on the amount of active surveys a client plans to have. If a user pays $25 per month for the membership option, the user receives 10 MB of storage space for surveys. Without the membership option, user account data will be removed from the system five days after the end of the last survey.
Packages for surveys that are temporarily active cost $600 per year to have one survey active at a time. Discounts are applied to subscriptions needing multiple surveys active at one time. Customers can have more than five surveys active at a time at the cost of $600 each per year.
Other price options are available.
Web-based surveys can be more effective than a paper-based or telephone survey because people may have an easier time filling them out and sending them back, Bakar said. Online surveys are also more cost-effective, especially when the average survey receives about a 50-percent response rate.
Web-based surveys like Ioxphere can also be used for different purposes.
“People are used to using technology to access clients,” Bakar said. “Technology like this can do more than just a survey.”
Runzheimer International, based in Rochester, Wis., is a client of Xorbix and uses Ioxphere to conduct relocation surveys, Bakar said. The relocation surveys are conducted to obtain data from large corporations. They can have up to 250 questions and take four to six hours to complete.
Xorbix and Runzheimer built a portal within Ioxphere where Runzheimer can sell the survey results back to the companies that participated, once the report is complete, Bakar said.
Milwaukee-based MGIC Investment Corp., a provider of private mortgage insurance, uses Ioxphere to internally survey employees for job assessment purposes and to externally survey customers, said Jack Long, regional sales manager for MGIC.
Using the Web-based survey creation technology of Ioxphere, MGIC was able to create an online form for customers seeking loans.
“Behind the scenes, we created an application where the customers of our customers could come in, fill out a mortgage application online and then the data would be made available to the mortgage lender to follow-up with the customer,” Long said.
MGIC also used Ioxphere to offer a contest to its clients in the form of a football pool for entertainment purposes, Long said. MGIC used the survey software to create a survey asking customers to submit their football picks each week. Ioxphere automatically tallied the results and put the selections into an Excel file.
MGIC was able to use Ioxphere to work with more than 300 Web sites it was hosting.
“To be able to communicate with a customer, have them input data and provide that data back to you opens the door to do anything,” Long said.
Technotes
International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans
The International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, Brookfield, introduced a new e-learning course, COBRA. The course provides an overview of COBRA terms and concepts, responsibilities and liabilities under COBRA, triggering events, COBRA election procedures, qualifying beneficiaries and events and notification requirements. The COBRA e-learning course is designed for those new to COBRA responsibility or practitioners needing a refresher in the area, professionals wanting to expand their knowledge into the area of COBRA, and small business owners and management. The interactive four-hour course allows users to bookmark their progress and return to where they left off in the course. Registered users will have access to the course for six months. For more information, visit www.ifebp.org/elearning.
RedPrairie Corp.
RedPrairie Corp., Waukesha, launched an in-house hosting services offering for its DLx transportation management solution (TMS). The on-demand hosted solution option places tier-one TMS capabilities within reach of midsize and smaller companies, in addition to offering an alternative, cost-effective solution for larger companies. The RedPrairie TMS suite is now offered in three purchasing options, including traditional license, hosted license and software as a service. RedPrairie also offers modular pricing for the service.
RedPrairie recently partnered with Unilever, London, in the trial of an electronic product code information service (EPCIS) to collect and access information from within the company’s logistics environment and from trading partners in the supply chain. Through RFID enablement and its integration with EPCIS, Unilever is looking to create additional business value in the areas of promotion management, supply chain visibility and metrics and RFID readability. The EPCIS is a specification for a standard interface for accessing EPC-related information. RedPrairie provides information on RFID tags in the EPCIS specification to Unilever, including commissioning tags, tag aggregation and shipping verification.
Trissential LLC
Michelle Burke and Michael Vinje, principals for Trissential LLC, Hartland, and project management experts, were selected as the co-authors of the monthly “Project Seasoned Advice for IT Management” column of CIO Decisions, a national publication focused on aligning information technology (IT) and business in the mid-market enterprise. Trissential is the only company authoring the column. The first article titled “Project Management – Art vs. Science” will be published in the January 2007 issue.
