In one of my previous articles I explored how we might find the customer service issues hidden within the masses of text we receive on a daily basis through an online feedback form. In this article we will take a look at what we could do next once we know what the main customer issues are.

Acting on the Data

When we start to see trends forming that is when we can build categories and decide a system of actions for those categories. For instance, we might push certain new messages to our support departments to be expedited automatically, while other less pressing issues can sit in a queue for a little longer.

When we have a ‘security’ issue come through we want to send them quickly to be handled by our ‘security specialist’. If a message contains a request that deal with writing Macros we would want one of the developers to help with that.

Does this sound like something you would like to use?

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So InPrivate Filtering has had a dose of steroids and changed its name (confusingly) to Tracking Protection. Tracking Protection helps protect users from being tracked online by blocking third-party content such as images, text & cookies. By importing a Tracking Protection List (much in the same way we used to import .xml files with pre-defined filters in IPF for IE8) we can better lock down our privacy and rid ourselves of ads.

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One of the first things to do on a machine running IE 8 is turn off the Suggested Sites feature.
This feature looks at the sites you visit and then attempts to guess what other sites you might like and suggest them to you.
Awe, the thought is nice, but … no thanks.

Here’s how to turn it off

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If you want to use a Ringtone for your iPhone, of your favorite song, you have a few choices:

• Pay an outrageous amount (sometimes up to $3.99 USD per ringtone or $9.99/month subscription to a ringtone service.)
• Buy an App (there are some out there for $0.99 but I haven’t tested them and can’t recommend them.)
• Follow this guide and make ringtones from your songs–for free.

Learn, in this guide, how to make a ringtone with iTunes for your iPhone.

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Update: Part 2 of this article can be found here.

Using spreadsheets to analyze numerical or well-categorized data is relatively straightforward. It might not be easy necessarily, but at least you normally know exactly what to do. If you have ever been faced with open-ended text responses, perhaps from a survey, emailed questions or feedback forms, you know how tricky it can be to make sense of it.

The problems are many. Non-standard formatting, having to manually read each response to understand its content, variable length, and those are just the first that come to mind.

What we need is some way to drill down automatically to see if there are any common patterns, and therefore have an immediate starting point to start interpreting the responses.

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In the last guide, I showed you how to extract files from multi-part archives. If you want to create on of these archives yourself, follow this guide. This guide will show you how to create multi-part archives with the following tools:

• 7-Zip
• WinRAR

Why would you want to create a multi-part archive?

• You want to email a large file to a friend but your email limits attachment sizes to 20MB.
• You want to host a file and want people to have a greater chance of wasting less time with failed downloads.
• You have a file that’s over 4GB and you’re moving it to a file system that doesn’t support such a large size (i.e. FAT32.)
• You need to spread the archive across multiple thumb drives, CDs, DVDs etc.

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