Author Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, publishes books about business, customer service, the call center industry, and business and writing.
Are you into Twitter? Do you tweet? Twitter, by the way, is self-billed as a “social messaging utility.” I prefer an alternate description as a “micro-blogging service.” Frankly, it’s been a challenge for me to keep these blog posts under my self-imposed limit of 300 words (this one stands at 278), so I can’t fathom […]
By Peter DeHaan, PhD IVR (Interactive Voice Response) has its place in the call center, but we need not overstate what that place is. If IVR can truly speed up the call for the caller or gather information to assist the agent in providing better service, then use it. However, when the primary goal of […]
A weekly (or almost weekly) magazine that I receive, recently announced that it was going to have four “green” issues this year, with the goal of being “carbon neutral” in 10 years. I was curious how they would handle this “green” issue. o their credit, they emailed me when it was ready and I went […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Among other things, my son Dan is a hockey player. We’ll never know if there was any connection, but this past summer he began experiencing lower back pain. The common advice to “take it easy and rest” was not helping, so we embarked on a more intentional course of action, […]
Weekly news publications, I am told, are the ones most squeezed in today’s markets. They are wedged between the proverbial “rock” (instant news via the Internet that trumps weekly updates) and “hard place” (advertisers reallocating their ad dollars towards more established monthlies that target the same audience or online). One of the magazines that I […]
Today I learned that another magazine I read is ceasing publication. This isn’t really a surprise to me. In fact, I’m surprised that they have hung on this long. They were an advertiser-supported magazine and their number of ads has been a bit sparse as of late. From my perspective, their content focus and target […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD There are likely as many billing plans as there are telephone answering services. It seems that everyone has his or her own idea of the right way to bill clients, with each answering service viewing its method as superior. Yet privately, they comprehend its shortcomings. In reality, there is no […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. AnswerStat magazine is an advertiser-supported magazine. That means that the ads in this magazine make it possible for us to write, design, print, and mail AnswerStat to you. You read AnswerStat because you value the content. Advertisers support AnswerStat because they know that they can reach decision makers and influencers […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD I have long been a proponent of the necessity for outsourcing call centers to have websites. In fact, I view a website as a veritable requirement for success in today’s market. To the point, call centers lacking a website are quickly viewed as second-rate providers and not worth the consideration […]
A few months ago, I blogged about the various random press releases that I receive each day. In that post, I committed the faux pas of labeling them all as spam — and was quickly chastised for making a sweeping overstatement that was not entirely correct. In this, I was reminded that spam is in […]