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Friday, 20 February 2015

CALL CENTRES


CALL CENTRES
If you make customers unhappy in the real world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.                                  — Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon.com
Any successful large company spread trans-globally, say Citibank, can expect to receive thousands of telephone calls 24/7. Over 75 percent of these will come from across the seas, from countries where they have their many branches running. The company will be inundated by the sheer volume of calls originating every second! That’s perfectly natural; what’s 10 am in Dhaka is 10 pm in New York, with time zones split so widely. A working day call in USA will be an evening or night-most often late night call in say, Bangkok. 


A call centre is a simple solution to handle the volume of calls. Every country that the company has presence in has a dedicated office to take all calls from within that country, and reduce the volume of calls to its main office to zero, or thereabouts. Such a centralised office handles all matters related to that company’s local operations, receiving a manageable volume of requests by telephone and responding to calls asking for special or specific advice, be it administrative, financial or technical. 


There are two types of call centres, depending on the nature of services provided. These are:

·         Inbound Call Centres: Companies operate inbound call centres to service incoming calls from customers on product support and generalised information inquiries.

·         Outbound Call Centres: Companies operate outbound call centres for telemarketing, soliciting donations for charitable cause, political corpus building, debt recovery, market research, etc. 
                                        


A Call Centre in India                                                                                                        Source: www.forbes.com

 

Call centres usually have a large, well lit and open workspace with seats reserved for that centre’s agents. These seats are called work stations; each work station today includes a dedicated computer for every agent, a telephone headset linked electronically to other stations as well as to the shift supervisor. Call centres can be independent or part of a network with other centres, using local area networks (LAN). As technology jumps in leaps and bounds, voice & data routing inbound to any centre today are interlinked using something novel, the so-called computer telephony integration.

Monday, 2 February 2015

We, the people. . .

PREAMBLE TO THE CONSTITUTION OF INDIA

A cable theft left us (and several others) without telephone and internet connectivity over the weekend. Thrilled to be disconnected from the virtual world, I got busy with household responsibilities. And also managed to attend the Sunday evening service at our parish church, St. Alphonsa’s.

Imagine my confusion when I found myself staring at several whatsapp messages this morning. The same church had been vandalized. Last night.

Some reports term it an “attack on the church”, the cops call it “burglary”. The fact that this most recent one comes just a few days before the Delhi State elections surely seeks to politicize the issue.

I think of it as neither. We are exactly where we were a decade back. I wouldn't even begin to think of it as one religion against another. That's trivializing it and will serve as perfect ammunition for those seeking to divide us.

An attack on a church is an attack on Democracy. Liberty of belief, faith and worship is one of the cherished tenets of our democracy. Those bent on intimidating Christians in India are attacking democracy –their futile efforts will only serve to unify, not divide.

Without falling victim to dogma and hysteria, and rather than succumbing to the usual communal narrative, what emerges for me from this incidents is a narrative that undermines equal citizenship for persons of all faiths; and the freedom to practice one’s faith without fear or insecurity.

There is clearly a failure of the State in addressing the social and political challenges that feed these attacks. And as long as our Government led by the honorable Prime Minister chooses to remain silent, the PM's desire to transform India into a regional giant and a global force will never translate into a reality.

I refuse to be an unequal citizen. I will not let fundamentalists or burglars (whichever way you wish to see it) deny me my freedom. Gandhi was shot because the ‘freedom’ he propounded intimidated his killer. Freedom is a what these miscreants are afraid of. All over the world.

Sunday, 11 January 2015

HOW TO MAKE MONEY OFF THE INTERNET




WWW : THE POT OF GOLD AT THE END OF THE INTERNET RAINBOW
How to Create a Rapidly Growing Source of Income-1
Tags: Earn off the web; money from the Internet; earn money from home; easy income from home;   
Introduction
After the invention of the wheel and the harnessing of nuclear power, the single most significant event that has affected our way of life today is the Internet. Every single human has total access to it in the free world. It is one vast storehouse and also the channel of data, so much data that today’s terminology calls it the Internet Cloud, a deft simile, permitting what is called cloud computing; in other words, massive amounts of computing in zettabytes (ZB)(1021 bytes )and yottabytes (YB) (1024 bytes) across banks of high speed high capacity servers. The Internet (net) allows any individual who has a workable idea and the basic tools to work the net the facility to monetize his concept, no longer confined to the bricks and mortar markets of yore-the entire world is his market. If he is successful, then he stands to earn a pocketful of gold. He can work from home, with no staff to speak of, at times best suited to him and for as long as he desires. 
Let’s first dispel a myth here. If you think you can get rich overnight, you are living a chimera. It is simply not possible for, say one percent of over 2.45 billion users of the net (that’s twenty-four and a half million people) to all become rags to riches stories. There might be an odd case or two, but those are exceptions. It takes a patient and persistent shoulder to the grinding stone to earn the kind of money where you can live an enriched and carefree life, Yes, it can certainly assist you in earning more, thereby improving your standard of living-a better house, better cars, modern gadgets, etc. Interestingly, the fact is that you are not making money off the net. The net has become the de facto term, whereas you are actually using only part of it. 
The agency centerspan.org was the first to document its analyses of the Internet, which is posted at http://www.centerspan.org/tutorial/net.htm. They say that the "Internet is commonly considered to be a worldwide collection of computer networks, interacting with each other to exchange data using a common software standard." What is most interesting is the fact that the Internet does not have a central authority—there is no "Internet, Inc." that controls the Internet. Local government agencies create policies and standards applicable to their countries, but the Internet is not answerable to any single organization.
Of all the worthwhile features of the Internet, none has captured the public's eye and contributed to the Net's growth so much as the World Wide Web (www). A method of posting and accessing interactive multimedia information, the ‘Web’ is a true ‘information chunnel’, allowing users the world over to access a plethora of information quickly and easily. Very few people know that the first browser that brought multimedia to the Web was the Mosaic, designed in 1992 by programmers from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.
Today, several Web browsers are available: Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, to name a few. All use Hypertext for inter-communication, ie, use Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML), as upgraded from time to time, to link one webpage or site to another webpage or site. Apart from hypertext and multimedia as two outstanding features of the World Wide Web, the other distinct advantages are (centerspan.org):
¤        Open standards that allow Web pages to be viewed through most any computer with an Internet connection and a Web browser.
¤        The ability to make software and data files available for downloading.
¤        Ease of use; just point and click on your browser to access the information you need.
Digressing a bit, household income plays a crucial part in the lifestyle of the average family globally. Closer home, if the average American with an average annual income of roughly $40,000 is used as a reference group, the upper middle class person with a personal income in the range of $75-80,000 may be termed affluent. Sociologist Leonard Beeghley identifies all those with a net worth of $1 million or more as ‘rich’.
Elizabeth Warren, writing for Harvard Magazine reveals that the typical middle-class household in the United States is no longer a one-earner family, reducing parental control over their children, a detrimental side effect. Instead, the majority of families with small children now have both parents rising early to commute to jobs so they can both draw paychecks. “The only real increase in wages for a family has come from the second paycheck earned by a working mother," she says. During the recession, a large number of people realized that there was money to be made from home. Even as the current recession in the Western world and USA seems to be withdrawing, that factor remains unchanged. Work from home! For whom and get paid from which source, you ask? From the Internet, now that the job market worldwide has become accessible to one and all. But this market was always there, you counter. People were living off the net a decade ago. So what’s the difference? The difference is that the world is becoming more and more digital and that the definition of ‘Internet savvy’ has risen well above what it was a decade ago. Moreover, Internet approach and application machines have become far faster, much more user-friendly and are truly multi-task capable. 
For the individual or organization wishing to distribute information, the Web makes "publishing" easy and cost-effective. Putting information on the Web is quite inexpensive compared with traditional publishing, yet puts that information before a potential audience of millions. And unlike a printed publication, a Web document can be revised and updated at any time (ibid). A number of newspapers and magazines have closed down, while others have online versions as well as the good old paper tabloid. Schools are experimenting with the replacement of that text-book by iPads, eBooks are read off palmtops or tablets like Kindle, etc. The pot of gold is taking concrete shape!
That said, no one has ever logged onto the Internet for the first time and started pocketing dollars in a really short period of time. As with all things in life, there is a learning curve, according to Evans Stone, the ‘Home Biz Guy’. In takes an average gestation period of three years of work to build a home-based income. Once you break through, you could earn over $100,000 in just twelve months off the net, and since money begets money, you should now be established on the path to riches. You can come back to the one-income working household, to the benefit of those who will shape your tomorrow-your children.


Tuesday, 30 December 2014

QUOTABLE QUOTES




QUOTABLE QUOTES

If you're not familiar with the work of Steven Wright, he's the famous Erudite (comic) scientist who once said:
"I woke up one morning, and all of my stuff had been stolen and replaced by exact duplicates." He sees things differently than most of us.

Here are some of his gems:
1 - I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.
2 - Borrow money from pessimists -- they don't expect it back.
3 - Half the people you know are below average.
4 - 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
6 - A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.
7 - A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
8 - If you want the rainbow, you have got to put up with the rain.
9 - All those who believe in psycho kinesis, raise my hand.
10 - The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
11 - I almost had a psychic girlfriend, ....... But she left me before we met.
12 - OK, so what's the speed of dark?
13 - How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?
14 - If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
15 - Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
16 - When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.
17 - Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
18 - Hard work pays off in the future; laziness pays off now.
19 - I intend to live forever... So far, so good.
21 - Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
22 - What happens if you get scared half to death twice?
23 - My mechanic told me, "I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder."
24 - Why do psychics have to ask you for your name?
25 - If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
26 - A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
27 - Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
28 - The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.
29 - To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.
30 - The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.
31 - The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up.
32 - The colder the x-ray table, the more of your body is required to be on it.
33 - Everyone has a photographic memory; some just don't have film.
34 - If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
35 - If your car could travel at the speed of light, would your headlights work?