omg ... they are all losing the plot

Why do these utility/services/bank/whatever companies make it sooooooo hard ?

Why do I have to phone them ?  Why can't they phone me ?

Smart meters from a not so smart company ?

Even their own feedback page has an error ...

And just have a look at the response to my complaint .... I've pasted this in at the bottom.

In particular, why can't they call me ?  I had to give them my phone number when I lodged my feedback.  Who's the customer here ?

Update: 27nov2013 - I gave in and called 'the number provided on the letter' and was told that the serial number is the same as the NMI number on my usual electricity bill, but with one extra (apparently secret) digit at the end.  Then I attempted to get on the relevant website to register for 'Energy Easy' and received this response:

This webpage is not available

The webpage at https://energyeasy.ue.com.au/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.

Here are some suggestions:

• Reload this web page later.

Error 118 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out.

At this point, I gave up.

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	United Energy Service Desk Email Address Change
Date:	Wed, 20 Nov 2013 07:02:30 +0000
From:	UCMS AAM Service Desk <MailboxAccountUCMSAlintaServiceDesk@jemena.com.au>
To:	scott@nulinkanalytics.com.au <scott@nulinkanalytics.com.au>

Please be advised that the United Energy Service Desk email address has changed to:  ueservicedesk@ue.com.au

Please ensure that your records are updated to the new United Energy contacts as per the ‘Retail Operations Contact List’ (ROCL).

Your email has been forwarded to the new email address on your behalf.


-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	RE: Feedback
Date:	Thu, 21 Nov 2013 03:19:34 +0000
From:	ueservicedesk <ueservicedesk@ue.com.au>
To:	'scott@nulinkanalytics.com.au' <scott@nulinkanalytics.com.au>

Hi Scott,

Please be advised to call the number provided on the letter.


Cheers,
Rein

Reneir Racaza
Service Desk Consultant
United Energy Service Desk

United Energy and Multinet Gas
T:  (03) 92565249
E: ueservicedesk@ue.com.au

Unable to lead a shelta-ed existence ...

Update (May 2014)
I bought another Shelta umbrella ... big mistake, since that one also broke after only a couple of uses.  And they still want me to make a two hour round trip to get it replaced.  Never again - from now on I'm buying cheap Chinese umbrellas (which is probably where Shelta gets theirs made anyway) and if they break, at least I'll only be out of pocket by few dollars instead of over $30.

Original post
See below ... love the customer service (not) ...

But there is a happy end to this story.  

I decided that a round trip of 2 hours approx to take the faulty item back to the manufacturer/importer was not something I wanted to do, more so given that I don't actually have the receipt.

So I hunted in ebay for a replacement and found one.  But I messaged the seller and asked her to open up the umbrella first, to make sure it was OK, since my experience with Shelta had so far been not exactly positive.

And to my extreme surprise, the seller replied, firstly apologising for taking a whole day to get back to me (it was the weekend for goodness sake - I certainly didn't expect any sort of response for a few days at least) and secondly, to say that if I got the faulty item back to her with $7 to cover postage, she would replace it free of charge.  Now remember, this is a seller from whom I not actually bought anything, ever.

How about that for knock-out customer service ?

Here is her ID for anyone interested ... balloonsandstuff



-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	RE: Faulty umbrella
Date:	Wed, 13 Nov 2013 10:48:34 +1100
From:	Diane Stephens <d.stephens@shelta.com.au>
Reply-To:	<d.stephens@shelta.com.au>
Organization:	Shelta
To:	<scott@nulinkanalytics.com.au>

Good Morning

Sorry to hear about your umbrella, as you are unsure of the place of purchase, we would require that you bring or send you umbrella back to Shelta in Hallam

For assessment/repair.  Please note that the terms of our warranty require you to produce your proof of purchase/receipt for warranty claims

Regards

Diane Stephens

2/25 Conquest Way

Hallam Vic 3803

Phone: 03 9702 3377

Fax:       03 9708 6779

From: Scott MacLean [mailto:scott@nulinkanalytics.com.au]
Sent: Tuesday, 12 November 2013 4:34 PM
To: p&hvic@shelta.com.au
Subject: Faulty umbrella

Hello.

I received a nice new Shelta Umbrella for my birthday this week.

But the very first time I used it (today), one of the struts was bent and it wouldn't open properly.

It wasn't windy, and I got quite wet walking home from the station.

I have no idea where it was purchased, except that it was somewhere in Melbourne.

May I have a replacement please?

My address is:

Unit 3,
49 Head Street,
Brighton VIC 3186.

The design is the cats/piano keys black and white theme.

Kind regards,

Scott MacLean

 

    Scott MacLean, Director

      ABN 24 772 951 133

    T: +61 419 504 588

    E: scott@nulinkanalytics.com.au 

   W: www.nulinkanalytics.com.au

    B: http://nulinkanalytics.blogspot.com.au/

Still haven't attained my zenith ...

There's a NZ company, Formway, that has designed one of the best office chairs I have ever used - the 'Life' chair.

Compared to all that Herman Miller stuff, it's simply beautiful to look at* (a bit like contrasting a Kawasaki with a Ducati Monster - the former is all neat and clean, and the latter is all 'let's add another piece of piping because we forgot to do it properly the first time around').  It's also fabulous to sit on and work from.

So I ordered two Life chairs for my business, via my very talented designer Laura Shannon, some time in the middle of June. The only, repeat only way you can get these chairs is via the Oz/NZ distributor, Zenith Interiors, who describe themselves as providing ...

" ... innovative solutions for all work and commercial environments and aim to exceed the expectations of our customers. Service and performance via measurable goals have seen Zenith grow to become a leader in the Australian workstation and loose furniture market."

Now that may well be the case, but I am still waiting for delivery nearly three months after placing and paying for the order.  For two bog-standard-black (but, admittedly rather special) office chairs.

I don’t think that’s exceeding anyone’s expectations, let alone mine.

End of rant.

Update: 11 Sep 2013 - they finally arrived!  And I must say, they are worth the wait :-)

* Just to prove it, here is a picture of the Life chair followed by one of the Herman Miller 'equivalent' chairs ...

All-purpose announcement ,,,,

I am, strangely, reminded of the late and great Peter Sellers' all-purpose party political speech, when I read the following announcement about an upcoming conference:

"Business Analysis is growing at a phenomenal pace. Organisations are increasingly recognising the importance of business analysis in achieving successful change and many are investing heavily in developing this capability. The skills and techniques of business analysts are invaluable in shaping and forming business change overall as well as making the most of opportunities presented by new technologies. With the backdrop of a global economy recovering from a deep recession, organisations are in a constant state of fast-moving change and can't afford to get things wrong. Business Analysis capability is key to identifying what's needed and developing solutions that equip organisations for the future." Just substitute almost any field of endeavour for the term 'Business Analysis' and you will see what I mean.

Work(s) in progress

Forschungswerk (literally “Research works”), a Nürnberg based marketing research company, has recently (via www.marktforschung.de) announced[1] the availability of a procedure for statistically testing shifts/changes in NPS (Net Promoter Score).

As many readers would know (i.e. all two of you), when people think about NPS as a metric, they basically fall into two camps: those who think it is rubbish, and those who think it is the bee’s knees.

Regardless, NPS is here and it will stay.  So the question naturally arises, how do we know what is a ‘good’ NPS result, but probably of greater importance, how do we know when a change or difference in NPS is statistically significant.

To recap, NPS is simply the difference between the proportion of respondents who give an answer of 9 or 10 and the proportion who give an answer of 0 thru 6 on an 11-point recommendation scale.

It can in fact be easily computed in the statistical package of your choice with the following recoding scheme …

0 thru 6 = -100

7 or 8 = 0

9 or 10 = 100

… and then calculating the average score[2].  This then gives you enormous flexibility to (say) crosstab NPS by almost anything you fancy (i.e. there is no need to compute NPS ‘offline’ for desired groupings of respondents).

Unfortunately, the standard statistical significance tests do not apply when comparing different NPS results.  For a start, it is not too difficult to show that NPS has twice the sampling variability of a simple proportion (which does, of course, bring into question its suitability as a tracking metric – oops, here come those letters again).

There is, however, a way out, and one that I suspect that the Forschungswerk people have taken; namely to utilise a permutation test approach.  This is kind of hard to explain, but essentially, a null hypothesis that there is no difference between two NPS values is equivalent to saying that the two sets of results come from the same (statistical) population.  So if they come from the same population, then clearly we could validly mix up both sets of respondents into one group, and redraw our two samples, with no real difference in results.

And that is just what permutation testing does, except that it does it many, many times.  For example, we could draw 500 or 1,000 new samples underpinning each of the two NPS values from the combined respondent group, and see on how many of these 500/1,000 occasions the two NPS values were more different than they were in the original two samples.  If it’s less than 5% of occasions, then we can say that there is a statistically significant difference between the two original NPS values at p < .05.

This same approach can in fact be used to test the difference between other, equally intractable (i.e. from a statistical point of view) metrics, such as CVA ratios.

Clearly this approach isn’t ideal, since most standard packages used by the marketing research community won’t do it.  But there are some Excel™-based routines available (e.g. the excellent and home-grown PopTools[3]).

[1] http://www.marktforschung.de/information/nachrichten/marktforschung/indextest-neues-tool-von-forschungswerk/backpid/2958/

[2] Source:  Dr. Tim Bock www.q-researchsoftware.com

[3] http://www.poptools.org/

Best biscuits in the world ...

There are reports that Woolworths is foundering, or if not foundering, at least lagging Coles, not the least because of the foray into 'big box' hardware.  http://www.theage.com.au/business/choosing-the-right-hardware-for-growth-20130726-2qpp2.html

[Have you been to Masters?  It's great.  There are no customers to get in your way, and it's laid out pretty much just like Bunnings, so it's easy to find your way around.]

But I think I have the answer, and it's not that Woolworths should dump the Masters initiative.

PUT KOOKAS COUNTRY COOKIES BACK ON THE SHELVES !!

These are the best biscuits in the world, they are made in country Victoria, at Donald, and they should be regarded as a national treasure.

http://www.kookas.com.au/index.html

And Woolworths has chosen not to sell them any more ?  Makes absolutely no sense.

Shame, Woolworths, shame.

My goodness, that's a breath of fresh air ... :-)

The UTS Advanced Analytics Institute are running a one day course entitled "Introduction to Advanced Data Analytics".  Details are to be found  via this link ...

https://shortcourses-bookings.uts.edu.au/ClientView/Schedules/ScheduleDetail.aspx?ScheduleID=1270&EventID=1105

This particular course isn't for me, but I do (sincerely) commend the organisers for not doing the usual, and charging 'commercial' participants much more than participants from academia.  I also commend them for charging significantly less for interstate participants.

Both are very good decisions. 

For more info on the AAI and its activities, see here ... 

http://cfsites1.uts.edu.au/aair/news-events/newsletters.html

Is Westpac there yet ?

"Dear Westpac ...just some feedback … Having received your kind invitation to 'upgrade' to a super-duper Black Mastercard, I phoned the 'exclusive' Black 1300 number to ask a couple of simple questions, and sat for 12 minutes while waiting for someone at this supposedly 'Black Card Priority Service' number to be available to talk to me, before I had to go and do something else and gave up waiting.  

I would have been happy to leave my number and for someone to call back, but I know (from previous encounters with the Westpac credit card enquiry line) that this is not an option that Westpac offers.  [Even the bog-standard ANZ service is better than this, with many enquiries being able to be handled via their online secure email system.]  

So on the basis of this first and (so far) only experience, I would have to doubt Westpac’s claims of ‘black’ signifying a distinctly superior card product." 

Of course, I wasn't happy to leave it there ... I took the trouble to fill out a product enquiry request on the Westpac website, giving details of the above experience, only to push the 'send' button and receive this message:

So then I went to the section of the Westpac website that enables me to give feedback/file a complaint.  And  not wanting to type it all over again, I attempted to paste what was essentially the above text into the feedback/complaints box, only to receive this message:

The upshot is that I really don't think Westpac has got it, even after all their years in the market place.

So what am I going to do about it?  I'm buying more Westpac shares.  If they are using this approach to boost profits, then I want my share of them!

POSTSCRIPT 1 - (16 August 2013): I did indeed buy more Westpac shares, and so far (in just two months approx.) they have gone up 12% ! 

POSTCRIPT 2 -  (20 September 2013): Since writing the above post, I've had occasion to use my nice new black Mastercard to pay a sizeable sum for an overseas holiday, in $USD.  The fees charged by Westpac for this transaction of $USD20,000 approx were $AUD600 !!!!   So I did a quick search to find out why.  Here are the salient points in relation to owning and using one of these cards:

• Annual fee $395

• Fee of 2.0% of the Australian dollar value of any purchases or cash advances/withdrawals when the applicable credit card scheme converts the transaction from a foreign currency into Australian dollars

• MasterCard^® Issuer Cross Border Assessment - 0.8% of the transaction amount where a transaction is made using your MasterCard and the merchant or financial institution accepting the card is located outside of Australia

• MasterCard^®Currency Conversion Assessment - 0.2% of the transaction amount for converting foreign currency transactions made using a MasterCard into Australian dollars

The upshot is that the total fees for a $USD transaction of the type I made were 3.0% of the transaction value.  And, of course, you can bet that Mastercard/Westpac used an exchange rate that was not unfavourable from their point of view.

Almost needless to say, my Westpac shares are now up 17% since my purchase of them in mid-June.

Another quick word ...

Back in February, I very briefly reviewed the Wordle™ idea http://www.wordle.net/ and Garreth Chandler’s new option  https://www.wordyup.com/ .

Since then I’ve been playing some more on the Wordle™ site and noticed a link to yet another alternative at http://textisbeautiful.net/ .

And this one is rather nice.  In the words of the authors, their approach … “deals in concepts, not words. A concept is a collection of words that is automatically discovered from the text.“  Further, it… “provides more visualisations than just the concept cloud (our concept cloud is visually similar to the Wordle output but uses more advanced text analytics underneath).”

So I thought I would try it out for the text on my own website, as I had already done with http://www.wordle.net/.  Here’s the Wordle™ result redone, for reference, followed by three alternative representations from http://textisbeautiful.net/ .

I honestly don’t know which I prefer.  The Wordle™ obviously emphasises individual words.  The textisbeautiful format emphasises what it deems to be individual themes, and there appear to be far fewer themes than words on my website.  Maybe I am shallower than I think?

Big data ? _THIS_ is big data !

This  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461902402/a-bit-e-of-me?ref=card   is amazing.


Plus he does some rather cool data visualisations.


His website is http://myprivacy.info/ .

Book me, Danno ...

I buy a lot of books.

In fact, I buy books the way other people buy ‘souveniers’.

And one of my most favourite things to do is to spend a couple of hours in a second-hand bookshop.  That might sound sad, but in picking up one book, you can be holding 100/200/300 years of history.  In fact, I get a thrill out of simply opening up a really old book, with pristine pages, and realising that no-one has read those pages since the book was printed and bound.  [That probably sounds really sad.]

I don’t usually spend a lot, partly because the type of books I like, no-one else is interested in.

So if I go away on a trip, or a holiday, I will often come back with one or two (or more) books as a memento of that trip, plus the memory of the bookstore where I spent the time to find them.

I was recently in Hobart at the end of a holiday travelling down the east coast of Tasmania.  There are two second-hand bookshops there that I have a lot of time for:

•         Déjà Vu, off Salamanca Place

•         Imperial Bookshop, in Collins St.

It’s from the latter, that I made a few purchases this time.  And boy, did I hit the jackpot.  Amongst several other books, I purchased a copy of “Physics for the Inquiring Mind”, first published in 1960 by Professor Eric M. Rogers, of Princeton University.  It is beautifully written and crafted, all 778 pages of it.  And I especially like the blurb on the back cover.  Have a read of it for yourself – I’ve pasted an image below.

Shake, rattle and roll ...

I’ve been using Graham Williams’ “rattle” package in R.

What a great piece of software!

Not without the occasional bug, but Graham has been exceptionally responsive to fixing these, which is the kind of service that comes only infrequently (most notably otherwise, of course, from the guys at Q www.q-researchsoftware.com)

Here’s the in-line R command to get the latest version …

install.packages("rattle", repos="http://rattle.togaware.com")

And if you go to Graham’s website www.togaware.com you can download substantial drafts of his book  Data Mining Desktop Survival Guide (ISBN 0-9757109-2-3).  The book (also published in full by Springer Verlag) is a data mining goldmine (ha ha).

Do not read if easily offended ...

http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p2.html

And this one is even funnier .... :-) 

http://www.27bslash6.com/missy.html



btw did you note my misuse of the ellipsis-that-isn't for my colleague Irene ?

What Google says about data mining ...

“So what’s getting ubiquitous and cheap? Data. And what is complementary to data? Analysis. So my recommendation is to take lots of courses about how to manipulate and analyze data: databases, machine learning, econometrics, statistics, visualization, and so on.” Professor Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, speaking to the New York Times in February 2009.

Source: http://datamining.togaware.com/

Top tip for today ...

Irwin Greenberg (http://clicks.robertgenn.com/irwin-greenberg.php) apparently said:

“Find the artists who are on your wavelength and continuously increase that list. Learn from the masters, learn from artists alive today whether it's someone you may never meet in person or it’s a close artist friend.  

Visit museums and galleries, buy books and magazines, take classes. 

Embrace the life of a student, no matter your age or ability, and you will become a better artist”.

[Courtesy:  Ray Frisken: artnewsflash@gmail.com]

What's it got to do with us?  Substitute 'analyst' for 'artist' and substitute 'Go to conferences and workshops' for 'Visit museums and galleries' :-)

Does Excel™ really excel ?

A good friend of mine, when asked exactly what it is I do for a living, sometimes replies “he does sums”.

There is a fair amount of truth in this;  indeed much of the quantitative analysis that anyone does can involve doing lots of ‘sums’.

And to help us, we use various software tools such as SPSS, Q, R, Minitab, Stata, Excel,etc.

But occasionally we can notice something slightly weird, with an unexpected result, or a computation that doesn’t seem to lead to where it should.

Very often, this is simply a data cleaning issue (or, rather, a lack of data cleaning issue).  For the heavy quant people, there are well-known mantras such as “Step 1:  clean your data; Step 2:  clean your data again; Step 3:  repeat Steps 1 and 2”. 

Or: “95% of advanced analysis is getting the datafile into shape”. 

Or even, as lamented by Sherlock Holmes, in the Conan-Doyle story “The adventure of the Copper Beeches”:   ‘"Data! Data! Data!" he cried impatiently.  “I can’t make bricks without clay!”’

Another good quant analysis rubric is:  “If it looks unusual, it’s probably wrong.”

In the above vein, I recently came across a rather disturbing article^(a), published only a couple of years ago, that deals with a claimed plethora of computational errors that are literally built into Excel™.

After conducting a large number of tests (admittedly, some of them using datasets that might be described as ‘slightly esoteric’), the authors nonetheless conclude that “…it is not safe to assume that Microsoft Excel’s statistical procedures give the correct answer.  Persons who wish to conduct statistical analyses should use some other package.”

I discussed this with a senior statistical consultant, who replied:

“This paper criticising Excel freaked me out when I first read it ...  However, over time, I have become less concerned.  I looked into some of the tests … a few general conclusions:

a)         It is disappointing that Microsoft doesn’t fix these things.

b)         The errors are at the margins.  That is, we are talking about inaccuracies that tend to occur when the techniques are unreliable anyway (e.g., severe multicollinearity). 

c)         There is more than a degree of unfairness in the critique.  For example, in the case of Solver, I have found it repeatedly to do a better job than the various optimisers in R.”

So, given all the above, and all other things being equal, it is probably best to take the bad news concerning Excel with a grain of statistical salt.  Nonetheless, it may sometimes be wise to use two alternative computational means when working with something really critical, just to be sure.

What data can't (and can) do ...

I’m indebted to Julie Houston, from Nitty Gritty Research http://www.nittygritty.net.au/ for this very recent item (at least, very recent at the time of writing this post):

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/opinion/brooks-what-data-cant-do.html

The subject of the article is “the strengths and limitations of data analysis”.

Bit of a dry topic, you might think?

But the really interesting bit (are?) is the 250+ detailed comments posted in response to the article.

Worth a slow read over a glass of red, I think :-)

Amazing statistical fact #2

In any gathering of people, how many must there be to be 50% sure that at least two people will share the same birthday?

Answer:  At least 27 people.

How many people at that gathering must there be to be virtually certain that two of them will share the same birthday?

Answer:  At least 57 people.

As people enter a room one at a time, which one is most likely to be the first to have the same birthday as someone already in the room?

Answer:  The 20^th person to arrive.

What is the average number of people (selected at random) required to find two with the same birthday?

Answer:  On average, 25 people are required.

[Example: There have been 27 Prime Ministers of Australia.   Paul Keating, the 24th Prime Minister, and Edmund Barton, the first Prime Minister, share the same birthday, 18 January.]

Source:  All this and more can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

A quick word ...

A few years ago, Wordles™ were a popular means of presenting lots of open-ended text.  Here’s an example developed using the text on my own website.

I still think Wordles can be pretty cool.

But now, along has come the new, even cooler, version known as Wordyup™. 

Developed by Garreth Chandler and his team at Twist of Lime www.twistoflime.com.au, Wordyup “ … turns the usual 1000's of open ended responses on a survey into real insights with dynamic key word analysis quickly, easily and what's more ... it's fun!”

And more to the point, as Garreth says, he “… can't stop playing with it...”

Have a look for yourselves: https://www.wordyup.com/ and let me know what you think.  Better still, let Garreth know what you think. 

Amazing statistical fact ...

2013 is the International Year of Statistics.

So, to recognise that, I thought you might be interested in the following:

Suppose there is a medical test that is designed to detect whether you have an illness/infection/whatever.

Suppose the chance of anyone actually having that illness/infection/whatever is 5%.

Suppose that if you do have that illness, then the chance of that test detecting that you have it is 95%.

That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

Suppose the chance that the same test will indicate you have that illness, if you actually don’t, is just 5%.

That sounds pretty good too.

Fairly straightforward statistical analysis will show, irrefutably, that if that apparently reliable test indicates you have that illness, the chance that you actually do have it is only 50%.

Scary.  But it’s true.

Suppose the chance of anyone having that illness is actually much lower, say 1%.

Then if the test indicates you have that illness, the chance that you actually do have it is only 16% !

I learned about the above from Kerry Mengersen, whose course “Bayes for Beginners” I undertook back in 2006:  http://www.statsoc.org.au/CPD16