Tag: business

Slash Your Heating Costs This Winter

Use these low-cost and no-cost ways to lower your heating bill, regardless of your heat source. Read on if you’d like to save 20% or more on your heating bills this winter.

The cost of heating your home — and your home office — could put a huge hole in your budget this winter whether you heat with oil, gas, or electric. Even if you get the best price for heating oil in your area, for instance, you might need to spend more than $5,000 to keep your home warm.

But there are steps you can take to potentially save you 20% or more on heating costs when those penetrating arctic winds start to blow. For those on limited budgets, there are many ways to lower heating bills that don’t cost a dime. There are also weatherization applications that require anywhere from a small to middling investment of cash, yet

Read more Continue reading

Guide to hiring family members for small businesses

You may consider nepotism unethical, but you’ve also probably shopped at a “family business” in your local area at some point. Those considerations might make you wonder if you can hire family members to work for you as a small business owner.

When you’re getting your business off the ground, it’s normal to lean on family for help. After all, you know their work ethic and already have an established relationship. But how will you create boundaries between your personal and professional lives? Will you struggle to stay objective about your family member’s work performance? And how will this whole situation impact your other employees?

Hiring family members is a legal and acceptable practice in many businesses, but you have to deal with it carefully to avoid legal complications and unhappy employees. So in this guide, we’ll explore the ethics, legality, advantages, drawbacks, and what to consider when hiring family Read more

Continue reading

What is a Contact Center? The What, How, and Why

We’re all familiar with call centers. You’ve probably phoned one, seen one on TV, or even worked in one.

A typical setup is a bank of desks and people answering and making phone calls. 

Who’s on the end of those calls?

Customers.

Existing customers, potential customers, and even internal customers.

But the way customers reach your business has changed over the last decade.

  • 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. 
  • 81% of customers try a self-service option before calling you.

So the call center, while nowhere near redundant, now handles fewer voice queries than ever before.

That’s where the term contact center comes in. When businesses offer other methods of contact, we refer to this as a contact center rather than a call center.

Similar. But different. Better, even.

In this post, we dive into what a contact center is, introduce variations of how the phrase is used,

Read more Continue reading

T-swift dominates the Billboard Hot 100




 / T-Swift dominates the Billboard Hot 100














Taylor Swift released her latest album “Midnights” at the end of October 2022 and for the week of November 5th, 2022 it held all of the Top 10 spots on the Billboard Hot 100. This seemed quite impressive but we thought it would make sense to go to the data and see just how impressive. Luckily, there is a Python package to pull data from the Billboard charts and using Domo’s Jupyter Notebook integration we can easily pull that data into Domo (I will note that this work was my first time writing python code from scratch on my own and I am quite proud that I completed this work with just a little bit of code review/revision from my team). For this analysis, we pulled the Billboard Hot 100 songs by week back to 1982 so we have 40 years of

Read more Continue reading

7 Ways Your Small Business Can Capitalize on This Peak Holiday Season

For retailers, the most wonderful time of the year is also one of the busiest. To ensure your business is making the most of this peak holiday season, there are a few steps you can take to prepare ahead of time.

Here are some eBay tips to help you optimize your business this holiday season.

In search of inspiration, consumers often start their purchasing journey on social media before visiting specific online stores to make a purchase. To meet them where they are, share your holiday listings on popular social media sites. Don’t forget to explain which audience your inventory might attract, any unique qualities of the item, and any promotions you are offering.

Document and post your preparations in order to get customers excited for the holidays. Customize your own hashtag and use it to brand all posts leading up to the holidays to attract more customers (for example,

Read more Continue reading