The Quality Franchise Association are delighted to welcome Umbrella Insight to the growing team of partner members. Umbrella Insight are the leaders in brand management and reputation, created to help brands build solid engagement from customers and staff.
Neil Newman is Operations Manager/Director at Umbrella Insight, and is eager to help anyone looking to boost their “Business Health Index” and engagement within the business. We spoke to Neil to find out more about himself, the business and how Umbrella Insight will be helping the franchising sector.
1. Please tell me a bit about yourself. What is your role with Umbrella Insight?
My background is virtually 20 years as Operations Manager/Director. My role has always been to ensure there are good solid processes in place, streamlining the business to run more efficiently and effectively and ensure the business has the right measurements (KPI’s) in place to confirm successful operation of the business. My role within Umbrella Insight is still the same but also extends into how we can use our platform to help businesses become more efficient and effective, whilst simultaneously being more engaged and insightful with customers, franchisees and employees.
2. Who are Umbrella Insight?
Umbrella Insight was created to help businesses get much greater engagement from both their customers/members and their staff. By giving a platform that is far more convenient, easy to use and a great experience ensures the business obtains far greater engagement, which means the business has both more insights as well as more reliable information based on volume of responses.
3. Where are you based?
We are based on the South Coast of England but like most cloud-based services it doesn’t really matter, as our services are accessible anywhere in the world, as indeed are some of our customers.
4. How does Umbrella Insight support the franchising sector?
Umbrella Insight initially started in the hospitality sector, as we could see there was a need for far better communications between customers and the business, and we saw that conventional methods of surveys are laborious, and where social media and peer to peer reviews can be an unfair way for customers to share possible concerns. Our platform enables the business to receive feedback in confidence, confirming what they are doing well and highlighting areas for improvement, again all in confidence.
The platform finally gives the customer an easy and convenient way to express themselves, whilst giving the business a highly informative and statistical view of how their customers perceive their brand/business without any additional workload on the business to do anything.
5. What does Umbrella Insight hope to achieve in the next 5 years?
Ideally, we would like to be a household name in the feedback and engagement space. We like to think of ourselves as pioneers tackling an old industry that has very outdated and antiquated solutions that are just not engaging and thereby successful in obtaining the essential information businesses need to know… “am I giving a good service…. And more importantly if not why not?”
6. What brands have you worked with in the past and how have you helped them to thrive?
We have worked with small and large brands in a multitude of scenarios due to the versatility of the platform. One of our largest clients was the Welsh government where we undertook a survey for them which typically netted them a 5% response rate. Using our platform we increased this response rate to 50%, that’s a 1000% more than they were getting. Just demonstrating how we do gain much greater engagement.
7. What is your biggest tip for businesses looking to be successful?
We moved into franchising and joined the QFA as our platform brings huge benefits for franchisees trying to ascertain how their brand and operational practices/key measurements are perceived by customers. As a brand is not just a product or service it has many dependencies such as customer care, delivery, environment and much more that make up the entirety of the brand.
Furthermore, for franchisors we enable them to see collectively all of this data across all of their franchisees, so they can see at a glance which franchisees are performing well and which could do better.
So as you can see our platform is a great fit for the franchise market, and will give any franchise that is using it a competitive advantage.
8. What are some of your hobbies and interests?
My main hobby is windsurfing, yes very 90’s but I have been doing it since then and it’s why I moved to the South Coast.
Interested in learning more about how Umbrella Insight can help your franchise? Get in touch with Neil today to find out more.
Umbrella Insight | Quality Franchise Association (franchise-association.org.uk)
