Author Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, publishes books about business, customer service, the call center industry, and business and writing.
The Hemingway Editor Guides Authors in Improving Readability A friend recently turned me on to the Hemingway Editor, a nifty online tool to assist writers in improving our work. The website says, “Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear. It’s like a spellchecker, but for style. It makes sure that your reader will focus on […]
Serve Patients Better and Produce Superior Outcomes By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. Some healthcare call centers only handle telephone calls by design and others do it because that’s what they’ve always done. But most have embraced a contact center mindset, where they’re handling more than telephone calls. Channel Options This can include email, text messaging, […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Determining an appropriate valuation for a telephone answering service (TAS) looms as a challenging task, one that many outside the industry don’t fully appreciate. This paper details TAS distinctives and explains how to best determine the value of a TAS. EBITDA A common valuation method for most businesses is to […]
Do you know how many words you typically write per hour? Do you know how long you can sustain that rate? This is a critical number to know when estimating how long a project will take. We need this for meeting deadlines and for quoting projects. Without having a firm grasp of our typical writing […]
Many writers want to write a book about their health scare that almost killed them. But will publishers be interested in that book? These stories are very personal for the writer, very real and raw. Unfortunately, it isn’t unique, and publishers want unique books. (Unless a writer has a big platform that will move books. […]
I used to be addicted to alliteration: the repetition of similar sounds near each other in a sentence, usually at the start of words. “Similar sounds” is an example of alliteration. An extreme example would be “Similar sounds starting successive words…” Just as some people consider a pun as the highest form of humor, I […]
The Benefits of Home-Based Telephone Agents By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. In the past few years, we’ve seen an unprecedented move to pursue work-at-home opportunities in call centers. Granted, a few operations were already there. And some outright reject home-based staff as an option. But others have embraced a distributed workforce as a new way […]
Many Writers Wish They Had a Mentor The problem is that those who are most qualified to be a mentor are also the busiest, and the people who have time are usually not as experienced. If you find someone who would make a great mentor, just ask them, but leave them room to say, “No,” […]
Work to Make Your Support Staff’s Job Easier By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD A common thread throughout these posts is that a person—not a department or an organization—provides customer support. The two exceptions are self-service and automated bots, but even these often require—or, at least, should require—an actual person to back them up. This means […]
Look for Ways to Applaud Customer Service and Patient Care Excellence By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Working in a call center is challenging. Working in a medical call center is even harder, especially given what we’ve had to deal with in the past couple of years. The result has been rapid changes, often in quick […]