Month: November 2022

Caption: Implementing good communication is key to retail business success
Credit: Tim Douglas / Pexels

Good communication in retail is absolutely key to maintaining staff morale and productivity, efficient team cooperation, customer satisfaction, and business success.

In fact, a landmark study by the Economist Intelligence Unit* found that poor workplace communication led 44% of the projects studied to remain unfinished, caused missed performance goals in 25% of cases, negatively affected employee morale in 31% of the cases, and even led to lost sales 18% of the time (some worth hundreds of thousands of dollars).

But taking time to implement good communication is no cakewalk. Training staff on how to communicate can be time-consuming and incredibly tough to do consistently across different areas of your business. 

Communication needs vary whether staff are talking to managers, each other, or customers; managing complaints, or simply updating stock levels. Simply saying “communicate more and

Empathy is a customer service superpower. It’s so much easier to get on the same page with a customer if you actually understand, feel, and visualize the customer’s experience.   

But here’s a question and concern: Can you actually train employees to have empathy? 

Absolutely. Not only can you train for empathy, you can provide tools to employees that will help them convey empathy as well.  

You just need to know how. 

Try role-playing to experience how a customer might feel. 

The way to train for empathy is to solve for the most common barriers that can block it. 

Often, customer-facing employees have never experienced anything similar to the situation that’s facing their caller. If this is the case, what’s helpful is to give those employees a chance to walk in the shoes of your customers. 

Case in point in healthcare call centers: the employees who answer the phones and

The business intelligence (BI) / analytics space has evolved dramatically over the last twenty years, including a move away from traditional BI reporting in the process, towards modern BI that meets the demands of modern organizations.

BI Reporting is No Longer the Focus

In the early days of BI, there were two key focus areas including classic reporting (which usually meant highly formatted, pixel-perfect reports such as financial reports) and OLAP style analysis across dimensions and measures (using pre-built and then later dynamically modeled cubes). The most popular platforms of the time were initially focused around fast, pre-calculated, file-based OLAP analysis. This was immensely popular as it was performant and also enabled business users to slice and dice across their core dimensions.

The usage more relevant to this discussion is what could be termed “bi reporting”, which essentially helped businesses recreate their paper reports in a BI platform, with a

Hosting a holiday party for employees is traditional for most businesses at this time of year. But hosting one that shows your appreciation for a year of hard work without breaking the bank isn’t easy. Here are a few hints that can help.

You don’t want your employees to think of you as the modern-day personification of Charles Dickens’s bah-humbugging and miserly “Ebenezer Scrooge.” At the same time, you do want to reward your employees with some frivolity and fun this holiday season but not at the expense of your bottom line. What’s a small business person to do?

However limited your party budget, it will serve you well to show your appreciation for your workers’ year-long efforts in some tangible and merry-making manner — to celebrate together in a social rather than business atmosphere. This goes a long way toward making workers feel valued and helps them bond with

Running payroll isn’t exactly fun. But every business owner needs to do it if they want to keep employees happy (and paid!)

The payroll process covers everything that goes into paying employees while staying compliant with labor and tax laws — like registering for tax IDs, accurately tracking hours, calculating and withholding taxes, and sharing pay stubs.  

It’s a lot, we get it. That’s why we’re going to help you learn what payroll actually is, how to do it right, and what steps go into selecting the right software to set up your payroll process.

What is payroll?

Basically, payroll is the process of paying your employees. It includes tasks like figuring out taxes — including social security and Medicare tax — and tracking hours worked.

Converting timesheets into hours, processing tax filings and