No matter where you live on earth, it is safe to say coronavirus has affected your life. As we find ourselves forced to stay at home, change the way we work and think carefully about how we get food, it is hard to ignore the lessons that COVID-19 is helping us to learn. The gravest of which is to value our elders, each other and life as we know it.

Moving offices is exciting — a brand new space, with new local coffee shops and places for lunch. The only problem is the move itself.  Office moves require planning, time and very careful organisation.  There are lots of moving parts to juggle and without a comprehensive list of what needs to be done, you could find yourself without internet connectivity or working phones.  Here we share with you 4 office moving tips that will help ensure your transition is a smooth one.

Transforming a business doesn't have to take thousands of pounds, management consultants or new training initiatives. It can happen through the smallest of changes. For example, a study found that when hospitals followed a simple checklist before a surgical procedure, death rates decreased by 40 percent. When Marriot implemented workplace flexibility, the company found that low-value work dropped from 11.7 hours per week to only 6.8 hours, and productivity increased even though the number of hours worked decreased. 

The formula for success for solving your customers' problems relies first and foremost on having motivated, caring, capable staff.  But even without 5-star customer support reps, you can still teach your team to solve customer issues in a way that will leave the customer feeling satisfied. Here we break it down into 5 key to-do's that will ensure this customer touch-point ends up being a positive one. 

Guest blog by Kurt Wilson from our partner, BlueJeans

British Airways and its parent International Airlines Group (IAG) have been fined £183.39 million by the ICO in connection with a data breach that took place last year and affected 500,000 customers who were browsing and booking tickets online. The ICO said that it found “a variety of information was compromised by poor security arrangements, including log in, payment card, and travel booking details as well name and address information.”

With employees now using mobile phones instead of desk phones at the office, WiFi networks have become a crucial component of business IT infrastructure. Staff that use their mobile for work via a Soft Client rely on the WiFi network. Without it, they wouldn't be able to make and receive calls.  

Often sales managers are good salesmen, but not necessarily good managers.  Having been promoted based on their own performance, they have very little idea of how to ensure the success of a team as a whole. Teaching others their personal sales techniques isn't enough. Good managers will look beyond a singular number (i.e. monthly sales / revenue) to help each member of the team succeed at all the elements of a sale from start to finish. 

What is call queuing? Call queuing helps to provide better customer service by managing a high volume of inbound calls.  Incoming calls are automatically put in a queue and the caller is regularly told their place in the queue.  For organisations like GP practices, which receive a high volume of inbound calls first thing in the morning, a call queue can be the difference between a frustrating caller experience, and a pleasant one.  If your customers get a busy tone, or voicemail box when they call, the battle to provide excellent customer service is lost before it has begun.  But call queues offer more than just a way of avoiding frustrating customers . They are an opportunity.  Play a Call Queue Wait Announcement that is both interesting to the customer and meaningful to your business, and you have succeeded in knocking two birds out with one stone.

You may have very fast broadband, or perhaps even a fibre leased line, and yet you find that your Wi-Fi is frustratingly slow.  When you do a test, it confirms that it is much slower than your hard-wired connections.  But why?  Part of the reason you decided to pay more for additional bandwidth was so that you would have faster Wi-Fi, but alas - it seems to still run at a snail's pace!  This is because the speed of a Wi-Fi wireless network connection depends on several factors. And like most types of computer networks, Wi-Fi supports varying levels of performance, depending on the technology standard.