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Rehabilitation – Who Needs It?

It could have been prophetic to be gabbing about hypocrisy and politicians for the last week or so. Following the terrorist attack on Friday, some of our newspapers (while leaking the identity of one of the victims before the formal identification had taken place – classy) latched onto the fact that the attacker had been…
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Not Waving but Drowning

I recently stumbled back onto an old classic that genuinely perked me up. Old – well it’s now been 50 years since publication; and a classic, because even after the extended passage of time, it remains bang on the money. The Peter Principle by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull. In it, they advance that…
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The Bitterest Pill…

Running a little low on painkillers the other day for the family medicine cupboard, I thought I’d procure a few packets of ibuprofen and paracetamol. As you can buy a packet of 16 for about £0.35, a couple of quid would see the Frances household ok. So, a visit to the shop and 6 packets…
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The Real Hypocrisy

In a week (or was that a decade?) when the UK Electorate asked themselves whether Boris Johnson could be trusted, UK politicians are under the most intense scrutiny. It is a General Election campaign after all. But hang on a minute. Surely the supreme hypocrisy in politics is for a politician to profess to be…
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Service, Please…

Black Friday will shortly have been and gone, so brace yourself for more sales analysis and the inevitable laments about the demise of in-store retail. With a foam finger-sized finger being decisively directed at online. Er, no. Online is just another channel. Now I am no fan of contact centres, but they made the transition…
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What is Art?

My tender auricles twitched this morning at the propagation of that wonderful phrase, the art of the possible. In fact, I do hear it every other day, particularly from BPO contact centres. They hold it dear and squirt it forth it with blunderbuss abandon. But what does it mean, and why is it so appealing…
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Levelling on Service

Back in the not so glorious days of the outsourced contact centre boom, we all had one objective in our crosshairs. And that was hitting the SLA. There was largely one channel (telephone) and an essential part of service meant that you picked up the call and did so quickly. Failing to pick up would…



