The 4 Keys to Killer Customer Service

The secret to a loyal customer base is no secret at all: Great customer service will bring them back every time. Here’s what you need to know.

Whether it’s a bored demeanor, a dismissive look or just plain rude behavior, sloppy customer service spells disaster faster than just about any other business transgression. People complain about bad customer service with the same level of vitriol usually reserved for taxes and presidential elections.

But bad customer service is no joke. According to Micah Solomon, customer service consultant and author of  ”High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service,” it can kill your reputation and devastate your bottom line. But here’s the thing: It can also spell opportunity for savvy business owners looking for a way to differentiate themselves from the competition.

We live in an age where a business can thrive or die based on how it understands and approaches customer engagement. In an article on Small Business Computing, Solomon says there are three groups of people who determine whether or not customers do business with you.

http://business.time.com/2013/07/09/the-4-keys-to-killer-customer-service-2/ 

Living room TV is 'making a comeback', says Ofcom

UK families are more likely to watch TV together now than they have been in over a decade, according to a study.

Communications regulator Ofcom said 91% of adults watched their main TV set once a week - up from 88% in 2002 - but their attention may be distracted.

It said the popularity of smartphones and tablets was taking teens out of bedrooms back into family rooms.

Most family members now multi-tasked while sitting in front of the TV, the survey of 3,700 over 16s found.

Far from technology pulling family time apart, it said, the huge growth in mobile was actually having the opposite effect. Family members are being brought together just as they were in the 1950s when a TV was likely to be a home's only screen.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23521277 

Why did offices become like the home?

While the idea of working from home has failed to kill the office, workplaces have started to look much more like homes, says Lucy Kellaway.

The other day I got into the office early to find a young colleague noisily munching his way through a bowl of Fruit 'n Fibre at his desk. Just behind him his dry cleaning was hanging on the coat stand, and on the back of his chair was a damp towel.

"Doesn't he have a home?" I thought. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23533038 

Selfish traits not favoured by evolution, study shows

Evolution does not favour selfish people, according to new research.

This challenges a previous theory which suggested it was preferable to put yourself first.

Instead, it pays to be co-operative, shown in a model of "the prisoner's dilemma", a scenario of game theory - the study of strategic decision-making.

Published in Nature Communications, the team says their work shows that exhibiting only selfish traits would have made us become extinct.

Game theory involves devising "games" to simulate situations of conflict or co-operation. It allows researchers to unravel complex decision-making strategies and to establish why certain types of behaviour among individuals emerge.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23529849 

You're probably more racist and sexist than you think

Not surprisingly, we tend to hear the most about bigotry and prejudice when it surfaces explicitly: see Oprah Winfrey's recent experience in a high-end Swiss boutique, for example, or the New York police department's stop-and-frisk policies, ruled racially discriminatory by a judge this week. But the truth is that much prejudice – perhaps most of it – flourishes below the level of conscious thought. Which means, alarmingly, that it's entirely possible to hold strong beliefs that point in one direction while demonstrating behaviour that points in the other. The classic (if controversial) demonstration of this is Harvard's Project Implicit, made famous in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink. You can take the test here: whatever your race, there's a strong chance you'll take a split second longer to associate positive concepts with black faces than white ones.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-burkeman-s-blog/2013/aug/15/racist-sexist-you-are-more 

Two-Faced Facebook: We Like It, but It Doesn’t Make Us Happy

The more we use Facebook, the worse we feel.

That’s what social psychologists at the University of Michigan report after tracking how 82 young adults used their Facebook accounts over a two-week period. When the participants started the study, they rated how satisfied they were with their lives. During the following two weeks, the researchers texted them at two-hour intervals five times a day to ask about how they felt about themselves, as well as how much time they had spent on Facebook since the last time they were texted. The more time people spent on Facebook during a single two-hour period, the worse they reported feeling.

http://healthland.time.com/2013/08/15/two-faced-facebook-we-like-it-but-it-doesnt-make-us-happy/ 

Oxford Experience 2014

The Oxford Experience

The Oxford Experience is a very special summer school that is run by the University of Oxford's Department of Continuing Education.
The summer school is held each year in Christ Church, the largest and one of the most beautiful of the Oxford colleges. Participants live in the college and meals are taken in the mediaeval college hall (this is the hall that featured in the Harry Potter films).
The Oxford Experience runs for five weeks and covers a very wide range of subjects. Each week offers a different choice of topics, and you can enrol for one or more weeks. In addition to expert tuition, the Oxford Experience offers a number of other interesting activities. For example, you can tour Oxford and the University colleges, or visit local historic stately homes, or learn to play croquet on the lawns of the Master's Garden.
Visit our Website for more information: www.oxfordexperience.info

Back to School: Off to Oxford with a MacBook Air

In late July, I had the great privilege of attending a special course about the history of British scientists at Christ Church in Oxford, U.K.

Going to Oxford to study has always been on my bucket list, so when this opportunity came up, I jumped at it. As one who has chronicled the PC industry from its birth and tracked the tech market since 1977, I was pretty much on top of the modern day scientists and inventors that drove our current tech revolution. However, when I was in college, my history and engineering classes paid only lip service to the pioneers in physics, computing and natural philosophy who did a lot of the research and experiments in these fields from 1720 through the early 1920s or thereabout, which laid much of the groundwork for a lot of the technology we have today.

http://techland.time.com/2013/08/12/back-to-school-off-to-oxford-with-a-macbook-air/ 

10 Ways We Get Smarter As We Age

As we age, the brain‘s processing speed begins to slow, and memory may sometimes slip. But there are other ways that our mental powers grow as we get older. In the current issue of the journal Psychological Science, researchers report that older people (over 65) showed less variability in their cognitive performance across 100 days of testing than did younger people aged 20 to 31. The older adults’ greater consistency “is due to learned strategies to solve the task, a constantly high motivation level, as well as a balanced daily routine and stable mood,” notes one of the scientists, Florian Schmiedek of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany. A colleague of Schmiedek’s, Axel Börsch-Supan, adds that his research shows that older workers are more productive and reliable, and less likely to make serious errors, than are their younger colleagues.

http://ideas.time.com/2013/08/15/10-ways-we-get-smarter-as-we-age/?iid=op-main-lead