Planning to sell Unified Communications (UC) to your end users? Don’t expect them to get too excited right away. Moving them from traditional voice systems to the world of IP may be exciting for you, but the basic components of voice gateways, core processing servers, and IP phones do not, in and of themselves, offer value to your employees. So, what’s the key to revving up your employees and ensuring optimal buy-in?
It is often said that coming close to death makes you appreciate life tenfold. Skydivers probably know this all too well.
Mary Schimch isn’t into extreme sports, but she understands the importance of getting an adrenaline rush every once in a while. As part of a lengthier writeup, she once said:
Around a third of the young US demographic feels let down by the education system, accusing their alma maters of failing to teach them applicable, real life business skills. A report by HR firm Adecco breaks down the data gathered from 1,001 students looking at the difference in thinking between Generation Y (born 1980-2000) and Generation Z (born after 2000).
Generation Z is either just entering college or actively attending the higher-ed classes. Generation Y, also called the ‘Millennials,” are graduating or have already graduated. Despite the difference in age and the hurdles that lay ahead, both groups have a common enemy: the difficulty of obtaining a job.
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Businesses sell products, services and information to other businesses much in the same way they sell to individual customers. There are more similarities between B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) than you would care to imagine. For example, fruitful B2B commerce relies on emotion. Just like you appreciate good design or a catchy ad, so do companies like to be touched deep down inside before spending on services, or products in bulk.
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The bigger the company, the more important it becomes to maintain a good image in the eyes of the public. But sometimes even the best trained PR staff can slip up. Especially when time is of the essence.
Picture this. You’re the chief operating officer at a big drug company, and you’ve just put the finishing touches on a new label. Within hours of giving the green light, production lines nationwide are already firing on all cylinders. But there’s a problem. The boxes are being stamped with stickers featuring the wrong drug.
Driving adoption of anything within an organization is difficult enough, because people tend to resist change. Even more so when it comes to all-new collaboration tools. So how do you ensure their buy-in and ongoing support for the tech? Easy. With some good old fashioned education.
It’s crucial not to take deployment lightly. We say this from experience. If you hand the management department a flimsy brochure or a demo video that just scratches the surface of the product, it might do more harm than good. Sometimes higher-ups may be even more resilient in the face of change than the workforce on the ground floor. When it comes to communication & collaboration tools, knowing the numerous benefits of each feature in part lets you align those features perfectly with your business.
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Quick: what are your staffers doing at this very second? If you’re like most organizations, there’s a good chance many of your staffers are attending to personal matters. But who says it’s acceptable just because it happens in other offices too?
According to a recent survey of 2,000 office workers conducted by AtTask and Harris Interactive – experts in management and market research – employees at various firms said they only dedicate 45 percent of their time to getting stuff done. The remainder (55%) of the time gets spent sifting through emails, or in meetings that could easily be replaced by conference calls. Also on the list of common pastime activities was “miscellaneous interruptions.”
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As part of a broader study focusing on the state of the Internet in America, Pew Research has put together a fun pop quiz that lets you test your knowledge of the web and digital technology in general.
We won’t spoil it for you, but don’t expect anything too fancy. It’s just a rudimentary assessment of people’s understanding of the web – how it started, key moments in its evolution, and the tech leaders who contributed to the way it looks and feels today. It’s fun, even if you’re a complete noob.
You’ll be asked 12 questions, followed by a short demographic query that helps the surveyors gauge the knowledge level in people with different levels of education, male or female, young and old, etc. When you finish, you’ll be shown a couple of charts to see how you stack up against the 1,066 participants in Pew’s live poll. The correct and incorrect answers will be shown as well. So even if you don’t get all of them right, you’ll walk away with some extra baggage of knowledge.
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When you hear contact center agent, the first thing that pops to mind is an employee confined to a cubicle with a PC and a headset. However, these days, that same job can be practiced out in the open with a cell phone. And starting this year, the practice is gaining some well deserved traction.
It’s not just the contact center staff that needs newer, more versatile tools to get their job done. The same goes for knowledge workers, roaming experts, back-office personnel, part-time or overflow agents, and even account managers. Everyone must collaborate to tackle customer issues, or to take full advantage of opportunities as they arise. However, for customer-facing employees it’s critical to have the flexibility to take calls anywhere, anytime, and on any device.
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Thinking objectively can get you places. Sometimes there’s no right or wrong answers. Just circumstances. Building a factory can churn out useful products and create new jobs. At the same time, said factory can hurt a local business, or pollute the environment. When timing and location are considered, the choice to erect a factory can be regarded both right and wrong.
But not doing anything never did anyone any good. Also, you can’t please everyone. So you do what you have to do. In the words of Henry van Dyke…