Bob Little

Research by specialist customer and change management company Customer Consulting Ltd (CCL) suggests that an average of 40 per cent of all calls to contact centres could be prevented – principally by overcoming ‘failure demand’. Failure demand occurs where an organisation fails to deliver clear and timely information - about a product or a service - to a customer. That failure generates a demand for customer service. Often that demand is registered via the organisation's customer contact centre.   Putting in place a strategy that eliminates failure demand will not just save 40 per cent of the costs of the contact centre and produce more satisfied customers – both of which are key goals for any company – but it will also improve staff morale and engagement levels.   Br... (more)

Social networking’s role in business success

Should organisations embrace enterprise social networking and web 2.0 collaboration tools as a means of additional, informal staff learning and development opportunities?   A study published in December 2008 by global think tank, the Human Capital Institute (HCI), revealed that over half of all organisations are experimenting with communities of practice for business purposes, along with... (more)

A Bard Approach to Learning Technology

In Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night', Malvolio receives a letter containing the words: 'Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.' Substitute 'e-learning', in all its forms, for 'greatness' and you have a similarly apt observation on technology-delivered learning. Some organisations take to e-learning as though they were ... (more)

ELIG hits out at cost-cutting

At its 2009 Annual General Meeting in Lausanne, the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG) formally endorsed the view that cost-cutting by itself was not a sustainable way out of the current economic crisis and that innovation was required now more than ever.   “With new ICT enabled tools we can tap the brainpower of knowledge workers in new ways,” said Richard Straub, ELIG’s Secretary ... (more)

Real transformation needs more than one skillset

Achieving real transformation in healthcare organisations requires more than a single skill set and, as many healthcare organisations have found, improvement programmes based on Lean are simply not enough according to Amnis, the quality, innovation and productivity organisation.   “Trying to achieve long-term change through a fragmented series of improvement programmes, or by focusing on... (more)