Small Talk - Blog by Houratious Albert

In this post, I talk about my experience and learnings from volunteering at the MyRoad program run by Beacon foundation . The program aims at providing career guidance opportunities for high school students in remote schools all around Australia with a focus on female students in particular. The aim of the program as I understand it is to provide exposure to the world of regular jobs; what can be expected in a working environment and to encourage students to continue further education. I was introduced to the program via my current employer, Readify. There are a few highlights that I found from my participation. 1. Structured mentor preparation The mentor training materials itself makes this volunteering program worth attending. The materials provided include very good guidance on working with young children, being mindful of cultural differences, etc. 2. Structured delivery for consistency The mentors are given a script that they can follow. This is carefully crafted t...

7 Practical Tips for Customer Engagement Here are a few practical and high impact tips that I have learnt and used multiple times to enrich customer relations. 1. Stating the obvious Most people who make decisions are under some sort of pressure to come to a conclusion. Some like to think through and come to a conclusion, but more often than not decisions come out as a response to something as opposed to a planned outcome. It always helps to call out the obvious impacts of a decision even if you think the customer is experienced. Here are two examples: Delay of work due to reprioritization: This is a frequent one in projects. Change of mind on priorities can have a flow-on effect for current work underway. Paraphrasing as "So, just confirming, you want us to stop working on X and start working on Y" has several times had the customer come back with "Oops, no no, I thought we can get both done on time. Thanks for calling out." Addition of cost due...