CHRISdotTODD

Let me start first by talking a bit about scope and strategy. The discussion on measuring your help knowledge base often gets caught up in the measure of call deflection on your website and the strategy of your knowledge base -- whether the knowledge base is primarily for your agents or customer help website. Regarding call deflection, it’s extremely likely that not all customers on your help website would contact you if they are unsuccessful with self-resolving, which is why how to measure or what to measure using call deflection is frequently debated. While your agents and customers have different needs from a knowledge base, it must serve both audiences! The fundamental issue is that agents and customers have different needs. In most cases, your agents know exactly the issue and what to do to solve it, they just need to find the right article to share with the customer. These leads them to often try searching based on a solution . Your customers , on the other hand, are vis

Recently a friend of mine asked me “I always wonder how to find a Boss rather than a job. Any pointers or experiences, kindly share. Let us assume I am on the interview and I don't know the Boss, the interviewer may be someone else.“ I thought that was a great question! I’m sure there are plenty of experts who have greater insight than myself, but this is what I offered. Ask the interviewers about how they like working at the company and with their boss. Also ask, what do they like most and may about their boss. Hopefully, you will eventually talk to the boss and you can ask him/her how they define success and what he/she likes most about their boss. Whatever he/she likes most is likely a strong trait of their own. Remember you're interviewing them, too. Don't be afraid to dig deeper for more insight. I’m sure there’s much more. A few more things have come to mind since this exchange. Prepare ahead of time and know what kind of a boss you like to work for. Th

I use a tool that displays elapsed time in the format of Xd Xh Xm, for days-hours-and minutes. If it's less than 1 day, then the output is Xh Xm. It's easy for me to scrape the output, but I need it in hours to manipulate it further. Example outputs and converted results: 2d 0h 18m = 48.3 (in hrs) 14h 9m = 14.15 (in hrs) I wrote an Excel function to accomplish this task. Assuming my output is in cell B3, this is the function. =IF( ISERROR (FIND("d",B3)),LEFT(B3,FIND("h",B3)-1)+(MID(B3,FIND(" ",B3,FIND("h",B3))+1,FIND("m",B3)-FIND(" ",B3,FIND("h",B3))-1)/60),( LEFT(B3,FIND("d",B3)-1) *24)+ MID(B3, FIND(" ",B3,FIND("d",B3))+1 ,FIND("h",B3)-FIND(" ",B3,FIND("d",B3))-1) +( MID(B3, FIND(" ",B3,FIND("h",B3))+1 ,FIND("m",B3)-FIND(" ",B3,FIND("h",B3))-1 )/60)) Notice it starts with an IF s

This eluded me for some time! Usually it didn't go all the way through the shut down, as there were files that needed saving. Either way, it was a pain getting going after my Mac was asleep. This is how I solved it. Go to System Preferences... > Security & Privacy Select the padlock in the lower-left. A user name/password dialog box will open. If you don't have the correct privileges for your Mac, you may be stuck at this point. Enter your user name and password. The padlock icon will change to an open padlock; The Advanced... button will no longer be grayed out/unaccessible. (See the image below.) Select the Advanced... button. Uncheck the box proceeding "Log out after _XX_ minutes of inactivity." Select OK Close the Security & Privacy preferences dialog box. That did solve the issue for me. I've heard from others that had similar issues, and what finally solved it for them was to make sure their hard disks didn't go to s

UPDATED: May 19, 2017 I changed the script to be more user-friendly and the ability to include HTML in the email body. I also found that Google moved a few things in the menus, so I modified the instructions as appropriate. Google Sheets has a nice feature to notify yourself if something has changed, but every person who wants to be notified must add a notification for themselves. With a simple script, you can send notifications to people of your choosing. In this example, I've written a script to send an email when 1 or more rows are added. Get started. Go to the sheet Find a cell in the sheet that wont ever be over-written. Enter the value of the current total number of rows in the sheet. Note the cell for use in your script. I used G2. Go to Tools > Script editor... Write your script. Add this script in the script editor. Change as required to meet your needs. function check4NewLines() {       // /////////////// //////////////// ////////////////

We push our writers to always front-load their titles and paragraphs not just because we think it's a good idea, but because studies back up the technique. Jakob Nielsen posted a great article, " First 2 Words: A Signal for the Scanning Eye ," where he goes into the details of his research in this area. Jakob starts with reminding us how our customers have many lists to read, err scan -- it's not just search results. Search result pages List of current and/or archived articles and press releases Product listing Table of contents Question lists on an FAQ page Bulleted and numbered lists, checklists, etc 11 characters is used as the baseline measure the number of characters a user actually reads when looking through a list (link text). The test is to see just the first 11 characters and see if you can predict what's behind the link -- what will you get when you click. The best link text has these characteristics. Plain language Specific te

As we know, readers on the web don't really read, they scan and skim articles, and won't read anything that's long form. With the Hemingway Editor , you can improve your writing by making it more "bold and clear" -- make your writing standout so your audience actually reads it. The Hemingway Editor is going to give you feedback and input on the following: Sentences that are too hard to read Simpler alternatives to words and phrases Unnecessary adverbs Use of passive voice Readability score The Hemingway Editor also has other helpful functions: Basic formatting Import from Word Export as HTML Character count It's free to use online, or a mere $10 for the app version.