There’s a very good reason why I zone out when I have something to finish fast. That reason is usually associated with an annoying voice, but today it was associated with puppy eyes. Seriously, I feel that this is the best strategy to undermine a team’s focus under deadline. Enter #uberPuppies!
Diana Stoleru' Post
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
Most entrepreneurs will tell you that, while they love what they do, it is not easy to juggle the many responsibilities that come with the territory. If successful, staff will keep growing in numbers, and invoices – both issued and received- will keep piling up. How can the SMB owner make one’s life easier?
New research indicates that a company with 100+ employees stands to reclaim the equivalent of 6,207 eight-hour work days over the course of a year by implementing Unified Communications (UC) solutions. In other words, SMBs are poised to reach significant growth by simply deploying new tech.
Last year, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made the headlines when she announced that her employees would no longer be able to work from home. Some industry pundits speculated as to whether that meant the end of remote jobs. A few months later however, Dell CEO Michael Dell announced his intention to enable half of his 14,000 workforce to work from home. At the time of his announcement, 20 percent of his team were already working from home.
So, while the jury is still out whether Yahoo fares better or not, Dell’s decision merely expanded what already proved to be a good decision: in 2012, thanks to its remote working policy, the company saved $14 million—and 6,735 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. It seems that offices will soon be a thing of the past, or at least will need to be re-imagined, as more and more companies are shifting to flexible working policies.
Business slows down in summer due to vacation time. That’s a fact. Be that as it may, for contact centers, considering the relatively low call center activity, the summer looks like the perfect time to see if they’re making the grade.
When business starts ramping up again, the quality of your customer service needs to be at its peak so as to bolster revenue, enhance customer satisfaction, and reduce costs. If your contact center isn’t ready for that kind of influx of traffic as business picks back up, you may be in for a surprise. For instance, according to a recent survey by Accenture, 51 percent of consumers in the U.S. will abandon a business if they are not fully satisfied with their customer service.
So what exactly can you do so that your company doesn’t become part of the statistics?
The surge of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has left some providers worried. After all, with the rise of SaaS, clients may be able to buy solutions directly from software vendors, skipping these providers altogether. But does this mean that in less than 5 years, service providers will lose most of their territory to vendors selling directly to the SMBs?
Consequently, a number of ITSPs and managed service providers are eying various services they can combine in a logical offer, so that their customers get hooked on the service, rather than on the individual products. A recent study showed that 68% of communications providers intend to offer SaaS within the next two years. One of the most promising services to incorporate is Unified Communications.
Research by MarketstoMarkets indicates the Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) market will grow to $23.34 billion by 2019 from the $13.10 billion it’s supposed to bring in this year. The reason is straightforward: many service providers are adding it to their portfolios, to complement their existing proposition made to the SMB customer.
We’re closing this race with a set of problems that rely heavily on context.
The Cool Summer Internship Race has been a driver of great attitude, since most of what we published left room for creativity, in every sense. What is more important though is that it turned into a driver of entailing actions.
What are we going to do next: we want to offer those who would like to become interns at 4PSA the chance to know us in a competition.
Inspired by cartoons, news and simple logics, we’ve come up with two more problems for you to solve this weekend.
Do not forget about the rules. The deadline to submit your solutions is Tuesday, May 8th, 10 am GMT. Results must be submitted here. You can solve the problem in a small team!
The Cool Summer Internship Race is getting closer and closer to the finish line. A big thumbs-up for all those who have already sent their solutions to previously posted problems and a piece of advice to those willing to do so: hurry up, we only have 2 sets of problems left! But we still have positions to fill. 🙂
This week is going to be more social. 🙂
We are thrilled to see that we rose some enthusiasm with the problem sets published so far. This fourth problem set is dedicated to strategy. We would like to see more of the “how”, and to this purpose, we are publishing approach-based challenges.
Do not forget about the rules. The deadline to submit your solutions is Monday, April 23rd, 10 am GMT. Results must be submitted here. You can solve the problem in a small team!
We are publishing this set of problems one day earlier, as it is Easter time and we’d like everyone to enjoy it accordingly.
Do not forget about the rules. The deadline to submit your solutions is Tuesday, April 17th, 11:00 PM GMT. Results must be submitted here. You can solve the problem in a small team!