This is a guest post from Derek Gallimore from Outsource Accelerator. Derek’s blend of extensive international business and travel experience means that outsourcing came relatively naturally to him. Derek has been in business for over 20 years, outsourcing for over seven years, and has lived in Manila, Philippines – the world’s outsourcing capital – for over five years. He has worked and lived in five countries and worked and traveled through dozens more.

A great business focuses on building customer relations. They need to reach out to their customers to fulfill their service needs, such as inquiries, service-related concerns, and marketing offers.

Someone needs to follow up on billings and collections. Another person needs to send out newsletters to its clients. When a new product or offer comes out, someone must inform the customers either through calls or emails. In some cases, someone also needs to gather data regarding customer satisfaction and commentaries on what needs to be improved in their products.

It can be tedious, especially for startups and small businesses with a few people on it to man these tasks at once, so strong customer service and sales teams are needed to fulfill these tasks.

Good thing is, businesses can rely on call centers to manage these activities. This article will tackle:

• Pros and cons of call center outsourcing
• Costs of an outsourced call center team
• How to find and hire a call center
• Best practices in hiring a call center

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Can you prove your team’s performance?

How do you know for certain that nothing is being missed?

The answer is simple; you perform an internal audit.

We here at Process Street know how difficult it can be to keep track of your internal workings. Short of documenting and tracking everything (which can be a hassle) it’s easy to lose track of the risks posed to your organization.

That’s ignoring how hard it can be to track whether your teams are performing their duties correctly.

That’s why this post will dive into everything you need to know about internal audits. These are practices that let you get an objective assessment of various elements of your company, such as this ISO 9001 process.

We’ll cover:

• What is an internal audit?
• Types of audits
• Benefits of internal audits
• Internal auditing examples
• Use Process Street to run your internal audits

Let’s dive in.
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I felt numb.

My relationship of the last 2 years had just collapsed, which was the straw that broke… well, my head. I spiraled into a mental breakdown.

I was living in Italy without knowing anyone but my (now ex) girlfriend, living in the same apartment as her, not being able to speak the language, and around $4,000 down in my bank account from when we’d moved there two months prior.

And yet, thanks to our employee assistance program here at Process Street, I was able to get back to England safe and sound, without worries about getting fired adding to fuel to my problems.

“According to the 2018 SHRM Employee Benefits Research Report, 78 percent of surveyed employers offered an EAP. Those same employers found EAPs to be a cost-effective tool to help mitigate risks involving employees within their organizations.” – New Focus HR, What is an Employee Assistance Program?

No matter how focused and productive an employee is, there will be times when they encounter personal problems that affect their work. That’s where employee assistance programs (EAPs) come in.

EAPs exist to listen to your team’s problems and help them through whatever they’re experiencing. In other words, every team should have access to some kind of EAP.

That’s why this post will take you through:

• What is EAP?
• EAP benefits
• How to set up an EAP
• Use Process Street to help battle your team’s problems

Let’s dive right in.
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Videos are a powerhouse when it comes to marketing, explaining your product, and much more.

Heck, when users are spending 88% more time on websites that have videos, you can see their power just in terms of retention.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to request or create effective videos if you don’t have experience in the field. Terms can be confusing, and video producers might struggle to act on the feedback you give if you don’t know how to communicate the message effectively.

That’s why it’s vital to know how to perform an effective video review; there’s an art to it.

At Process Street, we’ve gone through the hard work of learning how to review videos and give actionable comments. That’s why I’ll be showing you how to do just that., including:

• Basic video creation process
• Video editing steps
• What is a video review?
• Video review glossary
• The video review process
• Video review best practices
• Run your video review processes with Process Street

Let’s get started.
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With the market size of enterprise performance management expected to grow from $6.44 billion in 2017 to $11.72 billion by 2023, you know that to ignore it is to ignore something monumental.

Enterprise performance management lets you plan, structure, track, and improve your performance across the board.

Whether it’s through creating achievable goals that don’t leave you overreaching, improving your tracking metrics with apps like Process Street, or simply letting you know what’s going well and where the biggest improvements can be made, the practice isn’t something you can ignore.

That’s why I’ll be breaking down precisely what it is, why it’s useful, and how to use it.

If you want to dive into a particular segment, feel free to use the links below:

• What is enterprise performance management?
• What makes a good enterprise performance management system?
• The benefits of enterprise performance management
• How to carry out enterprise performance management
• Process Street: The perfect addition to your enterprise performance management software

Otherwise, let’s dive right in!
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“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watchmen?)” – Decimus Junius Juvenalis (Juvenal), Roman satiric poet

We’ve spoken before about the importance of meeting high standards with your work.

We’ve also covered, in detail, how failure to comply with industry standards and bad processes cost Zenefits $7,000,000.

This all happened because they weren’t meeting the standards they should have been with their internal processes.

To help stop you from falling afoul of the same fate, we here at Process Street will be covering compliance audits in this post. These are the guidelines that you will need to follow to avoid penalties from external sources for not doing your work satisfactorily.

It doesn’t matter what business you’re in – compliance audits are there to make sure that your customers are getting a satisfactory (or, at least reasonable) service.

We’ll cover:

• What is a compliance audit?
• Why is audit compliance important?
• Compliance audit types
• How to prepare for a compliance audit
• Process Street: The natural compliance audit software

Let’s get right into it.

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Business is forever changing and evolving. The things you need to do to stay up to date can be daunting but the alternative is falling by the wayside.

Plus, when 78% of millennial customers won’t give you a second chance, your day-to-day interactions count more than ever.

That’s why you need a solid knowledge management system. It’s the only way to reliably manage the resources available to your team and make sure that everyone can perform to the best of their ability.

So, today on the Process Street blog we’ll be covering:

• What is knowledge management?
• Why does knowledge management matter?
• The history of knowledge management
• Types of knowledge
• How to build a knowledge management system
• Manage your knowledge effectively with Process Street

Enough dawdling – let’s get started!
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When your average pitch is worth $5,800 per second you can’t afford to get things wrong.

You have an average of 3 minutes and 44 seconds to convince potential investors that your business potential is worth their money.

Oh, and that you know what on Earth you’re doing.

That’s a lot of pressure for any business owner. So, we here at Process Street have taken our own experience pitching to 2,500+ investors, venture capitalists, and business owners to give you the ideal formula for creating a winning pitch deck.

We’ll be covering:

• What is a pitch deck?
• How to make a pitch deck
• Why should you believe this works?
• Pitch deck examples

Let’s get started!

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“… 71% [of organizations] said their leaders are not ready to lead their organizations into the future. Only 25% of organizations said they had a ready and willing successor identified for one out of 10 critical leader positions.” – Brandon Hall Group, State of Leadership Development 2015: Time to Act is Now

Great leadership is like electricity.

Without study, it’s a one-shot, lightning-in-a-bottle event. However, with a solid theory to explain how it works and how to harness it, you can use it to power your team like a well-oiled machine.

That’s why it pays to know your leadership theories, and why this post from the Process Street team will teach them to you.

Using these theories of leadership you can analyze your leadership style and find out what kind of leader you are and how to more effectively manage your team.

We’ll be covering:

• Great man theory
• Trait theory
• Behavioral theory
• Contingency theory
• Transactional theory
• Transformational theory
• Situational theory
• Leader-member exchange theory
• Power and influence theory

However, before we get stuck in, let’s have a quick recap on why these theories matter…

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“To put it bluntly, goals are for losers… goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.” – Scott Adams, Scott Adams’ Secret of Success: Failure

Matching up systems vs goals might seem odd but the truth is that you should be using one and not the other.

Let’s be honest – we’ve all set goals that we’ve never met.

From broken New Year’s resolutions to a failed career as the next big rockstar, goals have a nasty habit of not being met.

Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert thinks much the same in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.

He identifies that everything wrong with goals can be solved by instead applying a regular system to complete your tasks.

I scoffed at first but then realized that I’d done precisely that to lose 70 lbs in six months and learn the piano.

That’s why today I’ll cover:

• What are goals?
• What are systems?
• Systems vs goals
  • Systems replace motivation with routine
  • Goals are hard to follow up on
  • Systems are consistently rewarding
  • Goals carry a more negative mindset
  • Systems are more realistic and flexible
• Turning goals into systems
• How to build systems

Let’s get started!

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