Engineering News – Innovation Reward

Innovation is crucial to industry and economic growth. That is why the South-African Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has introduced the SPII (Support Programme for Industrial Innovation) initiative to support companies in the develop of new products.

The winners of the 7th SPII Awards was announced in Kimberley in Sep’04…

Customer Feedback Systems won the small enterprise category with its innovative CFS Version 2 Service Tracka project.

The CFS Version 2 “Service Tracka” product is an electronic tool designed to obtain useful and reliable service information with little inconvenience to the customer providing the information. Feedback Systems GM Renier Botha says direct-customer, real-time market intelligence and operational information is an indispensable tool for any business, particularly those involving a large number of individual customers. “Traditional methods include direct or telephone interviews and the completion of forms by customers – all methods that are expensive and time-consuming,” he notes.

With the CFS Version 2 Service Tracka, electronic input devices are located at tills or at strategic positions within a queuing system. The customer enters his responses to questions, without assistance, into the input device. The data is then hosted and managed by CFS and, upon input, is immediately written to a database and results delivered electronically to the client as often as daily. “This enables the client to focus on driving service improvement,” Botha explains.

The CFS system has a number of enhanced features, including a card reader for linking to loyalty programmes, the location of ‘intelligence’ in the central controller, which reduces input device costs, and the activation of the input devices from the central controller, which allows for the reduction of fictitious entries. The provision of question template updates by means of programmable chips in the lid also allows updates to be made before and after deployment of the input devices making question changes easy. Local customers include banks, hotel groups, healthcare, retailers and the South African Revenue Service.

Feedback Systems started developing the CFS Version 2 Service Tracka system at the end of 2001.

The product was subsequently released on the market at the end of January the next year. Today, the company has sold some 4 500 of these systems across South Africa.

Feedback Systems also has distributors located in Zimbabwe (servicing African countries, such as Tanzania, Kenya and Namibia), Australia, Singapore (servicing South East Asia), Dubai (servicing the Middle East) and London (servicing Europe). “We have a total of about 2 000 Service Tracka systems operating in these countries,” Botha says.

The company is also currently negotiating a distributorship deal for the US.

Read the full articel here… Engineering News – Innovation Reward