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Research in ERPE (1994-date) to measure customer reaction and attitude to communication interfaces in consumer services has widely influenced the design of customer services at Bank of Scotland, Halifax and Lloyds TSB (now Lloyds Group). The ERPE metric and the use methodology it relies on have been adopted by enterprises in several service industry sectors — telephony, retail, travel and financial services. Since 2008 the use and impact has been predominantly in the financial services sector and is encountered on a daily basis by the millions of retail and commercial banking customers who use internet banking, mobile phone banking and telephone banking services that have been created based on the ERPE metric.
ERPE has had intimate collaborations with Lloyds Banking Group, who have now adopted our refined usability metric into their business on a significant scale. Since 2008 their business benefits have been five times their £7.1 M investment in the ERPE research programme.
This case study refers to the research/publications of Tonge on youth civic engagement since 2007, which dovetailed with his government appointment as Chair of the Youth Citizenship Commission (YCC) in 2008-9. The research agenda examined what citizenship means to young people; considered how to increase young people's participation in politics; assessed how citizenship can be promoted through community and political engagement and led a consultation with young people on whether the voting age should be lowered to 16. Of 17 policy recommendations arising from the research, 16 were approved by the government, improving opportunities for young people to volunteer, become politically engaged and receive better citizenship education.
Interdisciplinary work by microbiologist Smith TJ and materials science collaborators has led to (i) the development of novel environmentally friendly coatings for anti-corrosion and anti-biofouling applications that have attracted attention across diverse industries; (ii) the development of a platform technology that includes an antimicrobial coating currently under investigation for use on orthopaedic prostheses and (iii) associated work quantifying elution of antibiotics from orthopaedic cement in clinical use. The research has been disseminated via journal publications and patents have been obtained. Impact is evidenced by commercial interest, which has led to collaborative field trials under an EPSRC follow-on fund grant and contract research and consultancy funded by industry and the NHS.
Reducing vehicle noise and vibration is a key quality objective in the automotive industry. Historically, the approach has been costly palliation late in the manufacturing process; now a new approach applied earlier in the vehicle development cycle has been devised by Loughborough University and Ford and implemented at Ford that has led to savings of $7 per vehicle with respect to clutch in-cycle vibration (whoop). Ford has reported savings of $10M over 5 years, whilst reductions in transmission rattle have led to 5% fuel efficiency gains [5.1]. Ford has made an investment of £240M in its engine and transmission work at Bridgend, which includes aspects of work reported here and has created 600 new jobs [5.2].
Research evaluating a pilot service for people who had had a stroke showed that there was a lack of support to help them return to work, insufficient attention to individual needs and that their ability to reintegrate into the community was poor. Post-stroke conditions cost the UK economy £7 billion annually. The research findings have made a distinct and material contribution to refocusing services in Wales and England towards helping patients fit back into society after a stroke. Three out of ten services established in 2005/2006 in Wales and the original service continue, and have informed the development of further services in England. These services support patients to return to work and make other lasting improvements to their lives.