Six Ways to Offer Excellent Customer Service During COVID-19

During difficult times imposed by Covid-19, businesses and workers have the opportunity to stand up and provide exceptional customer service when it is most needed.

A customer’s contact with a business, particularly in times of crisis, may have an instant and lasting impact on his or her feeling of trust and loyalty.

Our team at F.H. Cann and Associates Inc. has decided to help you understand how customer service can work in your business and how you can produce effective results. The following are ways to offer excellent customer service:

• Excessive Communication: To achieve effective communication nothing surpasses face-to-face encounters  It may be difficult to remain aligned with customers on business goals, deliverables, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
  
  Businesses should strive to bridge the gaps that create communication failures during these periods when we are compelled to cooperate online. To accomplish so, they must overcommunicate by sending more emails and making more phone calls.
  
  This will go a long way toward ensuring that the insights gained during on-site visits are preserved, as well as ensuring that a business fulfils customer expectations.

• Keep the process quality high. While it is understood that procedures that are typically conducted on-site degrade in quality when performed remotely, this should not be used as an excuse. Businesses must devise a method for adapting their analyses to operate in a remote setting.
  
  Companies should aim to make their virtual operations match or surpass the outcomes usually obtained by on-site work, in addition to utilising consumer data and overcommunicating.

• Determine the Most Effective Collaboration Platform: While face-to-face contact isn’t always feasible, there are still methods to express the same emotion to your consumers. You can use work from home digital tools such as Google Meets, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and others.
  
  Companies who agree to embrace their clients’ preferred method of communication are meeting them where they are. This cooperative gesture will promote the idea of providing high-end client pleasure by establishing trust and value early on.
  
  Read Next: F.H. Cann and Associates Inc. Experts Weigh In On The Future Of Remote Work

Ways To Stay Energized And Motivated While Working From Home

Since the pandemic, working from home has come to stay. A lot of companies have implemented it into their normal working arrangement.

Employees are expected to spend some days in the office and some days out of it. It’s a nice arrangement after all, who doesn’t like sipping tea in PJ while working? It’s the dream and one of the reasons why freelancing is becoming increasingly popular.

However, as amazing as working from home is, going 8-9 hours without having anyone to talk to can become uninteresting really fast. When you’re working in an office, you get to talk to your co-workers, take lunch and coffee breaks with them and catch up on some office gist. But when you’re working alone, that’s not an option and that’s why it’s easy to lose motivation.

There are ways to prevent this and some of them are;

• Have a Schedule: If you’re working from home, it’s easier to keep postponing the things you have to do until a later time. Before you know it, you have a deadline you have to meet and you have to work extra hours, drink a lot of coffee and probably do a night shift. 

The best way to avoid something like this is to make sure that you have a working schedule that you’re going to stick to. You shouldn’t make excuses or do something that’s supposed to take 30 minutes in 2 hours. Fix a time when you begin and end your work daily. 

• Create a Workplace: As amazing as it sounds to work on your bed all day, it’s a bad idea. You’re either going to fall asleep or your brain is going to start associating bed with work and you won’t be able to sleep well on your bed anymore.
  
  That’s why you have to create a designated workplace in your house where you can do your job. You can use places like your kitchen table or the desk in your living room. Sitting up will also increase your ability to stay focused all day long.
  
• Designate Small Blocks of Time to Work: Working non-stop for a long period of time can feel overwhelming. That’s why it’s advisable to divide big tasks into little blocks that can be handled in short periods of time.
  
  This gives you the chance to cool off before you divide into the task again. You’ll feel more motivated if you tell yourself that you need to finish an invoice in 20 minutes than you need to finish 30 invoices by closing time. 
  
  Many have experienced the COVID fatigue by now which is why it’s important to find ways to motivate yourself. Furthermore, designating your time will prevent you from getting lost on social media because you know you have a short amount of time to finish a given task. 

How to Manage Your Remote (or Hybrid) Team

Operating a remote team where many of the people in the group work at home can be a daunting experience. The same can also be said for a hybrid team where some people are in the office, and others are at home. But we at F.H. Cann and Associates want to help you understand how you can keep one of these teams under control while ensuring everyone stays on top of their work.

Establish Sensible Expectations

The first tip to use involves looking at the expectations you’ll have for your workers. We encourage you to establish your values for operation and what guidelines people should follow when working for you.

It becomes easier for people to understand what they should do when they see what you are trying to support.

Allow People To Feel Local

It doesn’t take much for remote or hybrid team members to feel forgotten, what with them not being in the same room. You can create a local feeling to your business by assigning each team member to different tasks in a more massive project.

Everyone can have a say in what they will do when working, plus they can provide a more flexible approach to work.

Reasonable Scheduling Is a Must

The odds are your team members might be in different time zones. You can establish schedules with everyone that ensure all the people will stay in touch and that you can communicate in real-time.

Use the Right Software

Remote teams are more productive when they use the right software programs to stay functional and active. You can request everyone in a group to use certain programs that promote collaboration and productivity.

Slack is useful for how it manages team communication functions, while GitHub provides project management support. You can also use Google Drive for file sharing and storage needs.

The Best New Leadership Tips For Fall 2021

It is daunting enough to be a leader in today’s business climate. But with society changing so much, it helps to look at how you’re managing your leadership efforts. We at F.H. Cann and Associates have a few leadership tips for you to explore.

Avoid Being Dependent On a Hierarchy

Your organizational efforts should entail everyone having a say in what works. Using a hierarchy for determining who will make choices and decisions is not going to work well.

Involve other people in the business when figuring out plans. Give everyone a say over what they will do, and they will feel that their jobs are meaningful.

Provide Instruction by Example

Your workers will trust you more if you lead by example. You can provide instructions based on what you routinely do in the workplace.

Whether it entails understanding how to communicate with customers or how to organize certain processes in the workplace, you must show demonstrative examples of how to complete your work tasks.

Be Authentic

It’s easy for any façade to break apart when you struggle to perform in the workplace. You might show that you’re capable of doing something, but you may not be as effective as you wish. You can avoid this worry by being authentic and direct to your employees.

What Makes a Customer Service Department Great?

The customer service department at a business is one of the essential aspects of any company to consider. Proper service can be just as valuable as the quality of the product. Your business will need an effective customer service department to interact with customers and resolve whatever issues they hold.

Our team at F.H. Cann and Associates Inc. wants to help you understand how customer service can work in your business and how you can produce effective results. Here are some points that you’ll find in a top-rate customer service department.

Prompt Responses

People who contact customer service departments want answers to their worries as soon as possible. They don’t like to wait all day for answers. A great customer service team will be ready to respond to everyone’s queries in less time.

The country’s top retailers often take less than twenty-four hours to respond to emails, for example. The teams that can answer sooner will be easier for people to trust.

Tips For Borrowers Considering Taking Out Student Loans

You might have heard many stories over the years about students struggling to handle their loans. We at F.H. Cann & Associates recognize the unique needs people have when entering the work environment.

Part of this entails understanding how many people owe substantial amounts of money on their student loans. It can be a hassle to bear with student loans, but they can be necessary when attaining the education needed for one’s future work.

We have a few tips for you to review if you want to take out a student loan. Many of these points will help you well down the line when you enter the job market, as you’ll have more control over your financial situation.

Review the Features of Your Loan

Be aware of whatever things you might find in your student loan. You can review points in your loan like:

• Your interest rate and if it is fixed or variable
• Whether there’s a grace period for payments
• When you need to complete your first payment
• How many years the loan can last
• Whether you have the option to pay it off early

Student loan scams are on the rise! If someone tells you that you are eligible for loan forgiveness without even being familiar with your case, it’s probably a scam. #DontBeFooled protect yourself and report illegal activity. Visit https://t.co/fUbQGgOWLS for more info. pic.twitter.com/yJnE9o2Jyj

— FH Cann & Associates (@fhcann) April 30, 2021

Why Now Might Be The Best Time To Resume Your Job Search

The Covid-19 pandemic shook the whole world in ways words cannot describe. It was a survival of the fittest and nobody could tell what would happen next.

It affected all facets of our lives negatively most especially when it comes to how people were fired from their means of livelihood. Thankfully, things are coming back to normal.

As things are now returning to the status quo ante, job opportunities are now spring up to satisfy the growing needs of products and services. Therefore, this might provide opportunities for job seekers. 

At F.H. Cann & Associates, we are committed to job growth as stated above and in line with that, we’ll be letting readers know why now is the best time for those out of job to begin search.

The post pandemic advantage: 

We cannot shy away from the fact that covid-19 made most people lose their jobs. But as things are returning to their normal states, employers are beginning to get their profits back. Therefore, there is urgent need for more workers to get the job done and that is where you come in.

New startups: 

New businesses are now arising due to changing lifestyles brought about by the pandemic. As a result, there is a growing demand for new employees who will, bring materialize the aspirations of these entrepreneurs.

How To Mentally Prepare To Return To Office Life

The past year has been a phenomenal one in the years that many of us have lived on this earth. The coronavirus pandemic, and the resultant effect of lockdown, changed the dimension of things. For the first time, many people experienced what it means to work from home and be productive. 

While working from home is a leap towards what the future of work will look like, it brought along other thing. For instance, through this, many people felt work fatigue in a different way.

This has a way of reducing their motivation to work, and thus their productivity. This is expected, especially since many people have not yet gotten the hang of this working model. 

Nonetheless, things can’t remain like this. As you prepare to go back to working in an office and living the interactive workplace life, you must be mentally prepared. Despite your physical preparation, how can you easily add this mental preparation, though? This exactly is what we are about to explain to you.

At F.H. Cann and Associates, we provide our clients with contact center, financial recovery, loan servicing, and business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions. But this is not all; we are also concerned about how productive the people around us are.

And as we are also preparing for the post-pandemic contract center, we have put up this post to help make you mentally prepare for your return to office life.

Hiring Strategy: Build An All-Star Team With These Hiring Tips

When operating a business, scouting for the right talent has to be one of the most challenging tasks for the human resources department. The problem here is that everyone is brandishing themselves as the best fit for the job. And, since you can’t accept everyone, you are faced with the challenge of screening through different applications, which demands a lot of time and effort. 

True, this process is difficult, but you can use some hiring strategies to make the task easier for you. For us at F.H. Cann & Associates, we have built great expertise on securing the right talent. 

F.H. Cann & Associates (FHC) is a national leader in providing clients with contact centers, financial recovery, loan servicing, and business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions. We have been around for over two decades, and some of our respected awards speak to our expertise. 

As an organization with an All-star team, we are sure of our strategy that you can use to build an All-Star team. This post will let you know the strategy we have been using and how it can work for your business or organization.

How To Motivate Corporate Employees Through Covid Fatigue

When the Covid-19 pandemic first broke out, not many people thought of it as something that would stay with us for a long time. It first looked like some of those scary health hazards that last for a week at most and fade away afterward. But, as we have come to know, this is not the case for the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has lasted more than anyone of us bargained for, and the effect has caused different corporate employees to work from home. Due to this elongated time, fatigue has set in for many corporate employees. 

This being the case, it would be difficult for corporate employees to move at their usual pace if they are not motivated. When fatigue sets in, one thing that everyone needs is good motivation to still keep moving. For corporate employees, the story is not different. Motivation is needed for them through covid fatigue. 

In light of this we, at F.H. Cann & Associates, has come out with ways to motivate our employees through covid fatigue. In the subsequent paragraphs, you will be informed on what you need to motivate corporate employees. 

Start From The Top: If you are looking to combat covid fatigue and motivate corporate employees, we encourage that you start from the top. This is because those at the top would mostly be in charge of teams, and if they are not motivated, there’s no way they can motivate others.

If you are a business owner, you should also check that you are rightly motivated for work. Ensure that you and those at the top consciously make efforts to improve your state of mind towards work and other areas of life.