Monthly Archives: November 2018

Empathy and the invisible faceless contact centre people

Empathy is the single most important skill of customer care and the single hardest ability to learn.  How do you imbue your team with empathy? “I understand how you’re feeling.”  “Do you? Do you really?” Defined as the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the …

Pretraining and what eLearning can do for your business

Pretraining is a departure from standard HR practices which greatly enhances the recruitment process.  So how do you implement Pretraining for your business? Usually associated with Psychology, pretraining is training which takes place prior to another activity, specifically in advance of an experiment or test. When used in the context of HR it means to train someone before they are …

Parent-child, one to many and foreign keys in databases

Parent-child relationships, one to many relationships and foreign keys are the basics of databases.  What are they and how are they useful? Technically those names all represent the same thing yet why so many names?   This article looks from a business perspective at the power of this concept and how it can be harnessed. Whilst a very early concept …

Exploration of the edges of our current understanding

Exploration is the action of exploring an unfamiliar area.  Yet is there really anywhere left to explore?  Oh yes there is you just haven’t gone there yet! Ever think, I’m bored?  As part of staving off “the boredom of repetition” we are encouraged to “try new things”. Yet given global transport, global knowledge and all the information in the world is …

Standard measures and the problems they pose

Standard measures are internationally approved amounts and counts to help countries inter-operate.  Yet for programmers they pose massive challenges. This article looks at some of the most common measures and how they pose challenges when internationally used. Based on over a decade of writing systems for international use here are some of the primary challenges I’ve encountered and how I …

Voting psychology and should you vote in business

Voting psychology or “voting behaviour” has an influence in business as much as politics.  So as a manager should you ever allow things go to a vote? Following the recent political elections globally it is evident that voting brings out the strongest of emotions in people. So how as a leader do you consider your team’s feedback and opinions without …

Autopostbacks and the challenges of saving in real time

Autopostbacks are a great idea for ensuring information saves in real time until you get poor Internet connectivity.  How, why and where should they be used? The Internet is a blessing and a curse for programmers.  Autopostbacks address an operational challenge faced by web developers. However the reality of poor global connectivity and mobile connectivity introduces further challenges. This article …

IP addresses, white listing, blacklisting, locking and blocking

IP addresses are your phone number on the Internet.  Like phone calls you get good calls and bad calls.  So how do you manage your number online? This backbone concept of the Internet of having unique phone numbers has been around since the dawn of the Internet. Security management relies a lot on these numbers and this article looks at …

RSS feeds and how you feed your information out

RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication) are a very powerful tool available to numerous businesses but often overlooked.  How does your business handle RSS? Whilst many business understand that social media provides a way to contact the masses, not all businesses recognise the power of tools which led to the birth of social media. RSS feeds are numerous and very much …