All Features
John Courtney
Customers are the lifeblood of any business. Without them, there would be no profits to distribute, no people to serve, and no reason to continue operating. To keep your business running on a path to growing success, you need to offer a customer experience that will make customers choose your brand…
Alixandra Barasch
If you’ve ever played Wordle, learned a new language on Duolingo, or worked out with Peloton, you may be familiar with daily app notifications that nudge you to keep at it—or risk breaking a streak of consecutive efforts. Do you or don’t you heed the clarion call?
If you do, you’re in good company…
Kevin Ketels
The conditions that led to a shortage of baby formula were set in motion long before the February 2022 closure of the Similac factory tipped the U.S. into a crisis.
Retailers nationwide reported supplies of baby formula were out of stock at a rate of 43 percent during the week ended May 8, 2022,…
Katarina Bennich
Ever found yourself hitting the wrong button and then flipping through the manual in a frenzy, trying to figure out how to get that thing to stop doing what it’s doing? If your answer is yes, you’ve been an unfortunate victim of bad user experience (UX).
UX is defined as all aspects of a product,…
Lisa Apolinski
The pandemic arrived and brought with it many new and surprising changes in how companies do business. One of the most interesting, and most impactful, changes for organizations has been how consumers engage with brands. A recent survey indicated that consumers are rethinking how they interact with…
Knowledge at Wharton
More than a half-million healthcare workers in the United States have quit their jobs in recent months, driven to the breaking point by the Covid-19 pandemic. But greater use of technology could help save jobs by reducing the kinds of inefficiency and stress that lead to burnout for many hospital…
Sowmya Juttukonda
By 2035, artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to increase business productivity by up to 40 percent. It’s already a part of people’s daily lives and its use is only expected to increase to solve more critical problems that assail our world.
Businesses are looking at AI to achieve cost-…
William A. Levinson
Ryan Day1 describes how the rise of independent auto dealers is a “gray swan” event for the automobile industry. This was not only bound to happen, as observed by the author, but also long overdue. The article states, “...current state laws prohibit OEMs from selling new vehicles directly to…
Bill Kalmar
For years, when I was the director of the Michigan Quality Council during Gov. John Engler’s administration, we reviewed businesses across the state and looked for world-class service. What we found was that meeting and exceeding the expectations of customers was of paramount importance. And…
NIST
As a step toward improving our ability to identify and manage the harmful effects of bias in artificial intelligence (AI) systems, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommend widening the scope of where we look for the source of these biases—beyond the machine…
NIST
Whether it’s bananas, olives, potato salad, or cereal, many products are priced according to their weight. That weight is likely determined on a scale tested and certified by a specially trained state or local inspector. Weights and measures underpin approximately half of the United States gross…
Adam Zewe
Multiple programs running on the same computer may not be able to directly access each other’s hidden information. But because they share the same memory hardware, their secrets could be stolen by a malicious program through a “memory timing side-channel attack.”
This malicious program notices…
Adriana Lynch
If there’s anything the last decade has taught us—and the Covid-19 pandemic has punctuated in grand fashion—it’s that businesses must get digital or they may become invisible. Branding, formerly an exercise that involved plastic signs, billboards, and newspaper print ads, has now firmly taken up…
Ryan E. Day
Chickens come home to roost, and canaries meet their demise in coal mines. But hey, we knew there was a high probability of each happening eventually, right? However, when a black swan shows up with severe impact and consequences, everyone is caught off guard. I’m wondering if it’s a black swan…
Chip Bell
It all started when we drove up to the speaker menu at a quick-service restaurant. “Can I take your order?” the attendant coldly barked. When my wife, on hearing the deep voice of the attendant, politely said, “Thank you, sir,” she got back a sharp, “It’s ma’am.”
The attendant bristled with…
Josh Wilson
Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, Rahm Emanuel, a former White House chief of staff and Chicago mayor, famously quipped that you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Few of us will face the number of crises that a big-city mayor or a presidential aide may deal with in a day, but we still need…
James Wells
The ISO 9001 standard talks about the relationship between the company and the customer in a couple of places. First is management’s responsibility to make sure that customers’ needs are a top consideration, and that their requirements are met. Then that customer satisfaction is improving, and…
Henrik Hulgaard
As customer demands for more customization and choice increase, the complexity of products and associated product design, manufacturing, and sales processes also increase. Product life cycles are also getting shorter, requiring a constant flow of new products with high-value features and…
Gleb Tsipursky
Any association would love a member-retention rate of 75 percent. Unfortunately, according to a 2017 report cited in the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) publication, Associations Now, retention rates for all associations are falling. While in 2016, 73 percent of associations…
Quality Digest
Getting your product into customers’ hands is often an undervalued—and under-engineered—part of your organization’s value chain. If the pandemic’s effect on our supply chains has taught us anything, it’s this: Diligent reevaluation of our modus operandi is a must for success.
When the Covid…
Matt Fieldman
Some are calling it, “The Great Resignation.” Others are calling it “The Great Reshuffle.” After spending the past year as executive director of America Works, I’ve talked with more than 250 manufacturing workforce development professionals throughout the MEP National Network and our partners.…
Andrea Luangrath
Consumers who see a product on sale being virtually touched are more engaged and willing to pay more than if the item is displayed on its own, according to a recent research paper I co-authored.
Behavioral economists have previously shown that people value objects more highly if they own them, a…
Annette Franz
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Seth Godin’s concept of Finding Your Who, which is all about identifying who your products are for. The Who isn’t defined by demographics but by psychographics: Their (customer) beliefs, their dreams, their desires. It’s a reminder that developing personas is so…
Chip Bell
One of my favorite Halloween memories was decorating the annual giant pumpkin with my son when he was young. As a toddler, he was primarily an observer as he watched me sculpt the face of the pumpkin with a scrimp knife. However, his commitment to the pumpkin-carving process ramped up dramatically…
Mark Greevan
China’s dominance in manufacturing has made it the factory for the world. The subsequent economic growth enriched an ever-expanding middle class, and the country’s retail industry has quickly adapted to supply a growing appetite for consumption.
Some of these developments in the way people spend…