Charles Atkinson

Charles Atkinson is the Managing Director at QualityWorks Associates, which is focused on helping organizations measure, monitor and improve their service and service development. To accomplish this goal, QualityWorks utilizes a variety of tools including surveys, interviews, mystery shoppers and field surveyors. Before QualityWorks used Remark Office OMR®, they depended upon “the good humor and energy of everyone in the office to do data entry by hand. Needless to say both the humor and energy improved when we installed Remark.” QualityWorks began using Remark Office OMR in 1998.

QualityWorks’ primary use of Remark Office OMR is for conference and workshop evaluations, and for customer satisfaction surveys. A typical use is the evaluation questionnaires that QualityWorks creates and processes for The Management Roundtable, which is a knowledge and networking conference for product developers. Attendees gather at these meetings to learn about the newest approaches for developing products and services in better, faster and cheaper ways. QualityWorks’ evaluation serves two primary purposes: first to monitor the customer satisfaction of attendees and their responses to specific speakers; and second, to provide insight on issues that attendees are struggling with or are concerned about. Their questionnaires track satisfaction but also provide a number of open-ended questions that the client uses to supplement and confirm their ongoing research into development issues. Using Remark Office OMR 8, they scan the questionnaires quickly and accurately but more importantly the process, “allows us to seamlessly use voice recognition software to enter responses to open-ended questions.”

One of Charles’ largest Remark projects happened almost by accident. He received a call in the afternoon from a woman who said that she had been referred to QualityWorks by one of their clients. She was trying to scan some multi-page surveys about home buying wants and was having some scanner problems and wondered if they could help her finish her project. Charles agreed to help and she overnighted a clean, unfilled survey form created on the printer that was used to print the forms. Charles told his team to expect about 400 hundred forms that needed to be processed in a hurry. By 10:00 AM the next day they had the survey and one of their staff was busy creating a template for Remark. Late in the afternoon their expected package arrived and then another larger box, and then more and more and more. They suddenly had tens of thousands of completed surveys. Charles called the client and told her that someone had mistakenly sent them every survey they had ever conducted. She replied that when she had explained that they were willing to “help” her with about 400 surveys her boss told her to send them all of the pending projects! The next day they discovered that her printer did not print the surveys but had copied them erratically and the recognition rate was very poor. Charles’ team discovered some workarounds to the poor quality that increased the recognition to about 99%. With their hard work and Remark they were able to complete all of the projects, export the data to their required format and create reports for the company. They continued to work with this client for several years but improved the printing process so that they had more control over the surveys for smooth sailing.

When asked about Charles’ favorite Remark feature, he states, “far and away the best element of Remark is the availability of live, knowledgeable support.” Trailing support but still very important is, “the improvement with each new version of Remark Office OMR. The analysis capabilities are the addition that I appreciate the most.” We couldn’t have made these improvements without Charles’ product input over the years and are appreciative of his tremendous loyalty.