Blog Archives

What is an answering service?

If you call a doctor’s office, plumbing company, or property management firm after hours and reach a live person (instead of a machine or automated system), chances are you will be speaking with an answering service. Utilized by these businesses and countless others, answering services are companies that handle telephone calls on behalf of other organizations.

Companies that utilize an answering service are typically looking for a live telephone presence without the cost of hiring additional staff. Take the plumbing company for example. If they were to hire someone to take calls after hours, they would be paying an hourly wage to someone who may only work a few minutes per night. By using an answering service instead, they could ensure there is always someone available to pick up the phone but only pay them when they’re used.

Most answering services customize their services to meet the needs of their customers, which is why you often don’t know you are speaking to one. Their objective is to sound as though they are part of the business you’re calling. They have information about the company’s products and services, office hours, pricing, and other details that callers are looking for.

Curious whether a business uses an answering service? Call them late at night and see if someone picks up!

About the author:

Melanie Cartwell is a business blogger currently working for CMS, a nationwide provider of telephone answering services and call center solutions. Learn more at http://www.continentalmessage.com.

What is Workforce Management?

There is a new buzzword in the Human Resources profession, and it’s something that is finally bringing HR and Finance departments together (and that in itself is unusual). It’s called “Workforce Management”, and it is somewhat misunderstood at the moment. So what is it, and how can it help your business?

Workforce Management is a development of what used to be called “Time and Attendance”. Primarily used in retail, construction and manufacturing industries, where employees are used to working in shifts or ‘work patterns’, Time & Attendance has always proved to be an efficient, if basic, clocking in-clocking out system.

The advantage for employers was that they could easily monitor working times, yet the disadvantage was that it was sometimes left open to abuse, and that data didn’t flow from a Time & Attendance system very easily.

Today’s more mature development, Workforce Management, is a system that incorporates Time & Attendance with other features such as Rostering and Scheduling. It equally hooks up with your payroll system, ensuring that employees are paid for the time they have worked – reducing the likelihood of underpayments or even costly overpayments.

As a business owner, you will only really see the benefits of Workforce Management if you have a workforce of at least 300 people. Below that, there are simple online solutions which cost very little. Above 300, and you start to need an extra level of complexity. Some systems allow you to drag and drop employees into rostering schedules, and more complex ones alert you to preferred work patterns for each employee, as well as ‘premium pay scenarios’, which you can limit in order to save money.

Businesses who use these systems are experiencing savings of at least 2% of their overall salary bill, simply by reducing overpayments. That’s a stunning figure, and it increases when businesses use rostering systems to match their employee resources against peak periods. For example, a supermarket gets busy on a Saturday morning, but less busy on a Sunday evening, so the system can suggest the resource required. That helps improve the customer experience – and productivity – while helping the business manage cost.

Ultimately, it’s about running a business more efficiently – something that everyone is trying to do in these stretched times.

Nick Laird is Chief Commercial Officer for Ceridian, a leading provider of HR, Payroll and Workforce Management solutions.

How to beat Roulette

Roulette Number System – €4,600 in One Month of Playing

Have you ever wonder the secrets to how to be roulette? Online and Land casinos everywhere offer roulette and are always full of luck and unlucky gamblers trying to turn small bets into large stacks of cash.

See how you can win in the long term with this unique roulette system. This video explains how one person used a system to beat roulette. He shows you his account and his daily winnings for an entire month using this winning roulette number system.