Ever stood in a busy shopping mall in the UK (and by the way same question applies to Delhi airport and a million other locations) and watched how many people are on their cell phones? It’s frightening to those of us who remember old telecom technologies like switchboards, bakelite handsets and even acoustic couplers.
There are [...]

I am going to use this entry to have a customer service grip about banks (although the same is true for the Post Office these days). Yes, I know it’s an easy target but they set themselves up for it.
Now the bank branch I use is OK. It costs me money to park there, but [...]

I have been involved in the last few months in a number of discussions about benchmarking customer service. These conservations have sometimes broken down, or at least come to a sudden halt when asked ‘what is benchmarking in relation to customer service?’
Interestingly, I was clear that I was talking about the process, the measurement of [...]

Back in the old days (the 80s believe it or not), when PCs were called microcomputers, when we used the filofax, not a PDA, and the economy was just coming out of recession (OK, some things don’t change) – I was responsible for a fairly large business to business customer service desk. We ran a [...]

I attended a meeting last week, one of those large formal meetings, with a seemingly endless agenda with all the associated papers and not one, but two, people taking minutes (just in case they missed anything)…
At the start of the meeting, as the coffee mugs chinked, everyone emptied their cases and produced a stack of [...]

I have confession to make right at the beginning of this blog - I am not very ‘green.’ Anyone who lives, as we do, in a draughty Victorian corner house or spends a lot of time behind the wheel of car cannot claim to be… However I recycle and do all the things my conscience [...]

I have written elsewhere that risk is not a nebulous subject, or even difficult to understand and communicate. Indeed, it is something that we can apply relative measurements to and I would put forward a relatively simple system for quantifying risk. This can be used to prioritise actions, communicate and plan work.
Think about splitting risk [...]

Risk is inherent in all activities and by its nature is a fundamental aspect of both operational and project management. Good operational management is increasingly about identifying, controlling and containing those risks, a feature that project managers (using formal methodologies like Prince II or even informal standards) will be all too aware of. However, risk [...]

Last year in England, the national school tests for 14-year-olds had to be abandoned amidst a sea of accusations and recriminations. The US company managing the testing of well over half a million school students was effectively sacked and the Education Regulator responsible for the testing process, QCA, was severely criticised on many fronts such [...]

Since the start of the problems in the banking sector (let’s not go into how far back that goes), there has been a resultant push for more regulation to offset reoccurrences of the problem in all industries. The senior management in many companies will nowadays see regulatory risk alongside financial risk as the two key [...]