Make Sure Your Policies and Procedures Accurately Reflect Remote Work By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD In the past year, many healthcare call centers scrambled to adjust to ever-changing expectations and requirements to keep employees safe while continuing to work. Some call centers already had viable work-at-home protocols in place and a few were already 100 […]
A reader emailed me. He said you recommended starting by writing short stories. Unfortunately, I’m already near finishing my first novel (which took years of planning). I skipped the step of starting with short stories. What should I do? The main benefit of writing short stories before writing a novel is to identify and learn […]
What Was Once Optional Is Now Required By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD The potential to have remote operators work off-site from the main answering service location goes back to the 1990s, when I made a presentation about this topic at the ATSI convention. I covered the two key aspects of having a distributed workforce. One […]
How We Conclude This Year Will Prepare Us for What Happens Next Year By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. This year continues to be a challenging one, more so than most others—perhaps any other. As we look forward to a new year in our healthcare call center, we turn the calendar with expectations of a better […]
Move beyond a Mindset of Answering Calls to Facilitating Interactions By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD This year has been a challenging one no matter how we look at it. Our status quo as an industry—to whatever degree we ever had a status quo—has been shaken. Everything seems to have changed. Our response has been as […]
Now More Than Ever, Take Time to Say “Thank You” By Peter Lyle DeHaan I’ve seldom been in a call center that wasn’t busy. Even the ones that weren’t quite as busy as others still had calls come in at a steady pace. And this was during normal times. What about the not normal times […]
Categories
Introducing Connections Magazine 3.0
Discover What’s Next for Connections Magazine By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Over its twenty-eight-year history, Connections Magazine has seen many industry changes, with technological innovation leading the way. For industry veterans, recall what your call center looked like three decades ago. It was a vastly different operation from what you have today. We’ve also seen […]
Article Repository Consolidates Industry Resources By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD I published my first article in 1982. It was about pagers. Remember them? It was also the hardest piece I’ve ever written, but it set me on a journey for a lifetime of writing. Over the years I authored a couple thousand articles, some of […]
Categories
Serve Your Stakeholders
Understand Your Purpose in Working at a Healthcare Call Center By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. You work in a healthcare call center. Why? The most basic answer is to receive a paycheck so that you can pay your bills. Though this is an essential motivation, earning a living will only take you so far in […]
Categories
Editor Skills
There are three basic types of editors (and they each have various names). Each type of editor requires a different skill set. Developmental Editor A developmental editor, sometimes called a comprehensive editor, looks at big picture issues. For fiction this includes items such as story arc, character development, writing voice, and plot issues. Nonfiction looks […]