No more lonely coffee breaks

There’s a new casual networking venture for microbusiness owners, the self-employed and those working from home in the Sherborne, Dorset, area: weekly morning coffee breaks.

The idea was conceived by Nancy Weitz, owner of Architela, an online learning and internet strategy business. “I’ve been working from my home office for 8 years,” she says, “and though I spend a lot of time interacting with people online and by telephone, I’ve been a bit envious of those in traditional workplaces, who have frequent conversations with colleagues around the coffee machine or water cooler. It’s the one big drawback of home-based or independent working.”

So she approached Cordelia McFarlane of the Sherborne Chamber of Trade and Commerce to help set up just such an opportunity. “Those of us with very small businesses have a lot in common and could really benefit from networking on a regular basis, where there are no demands, no expectations and no sales pitches – just good coffee and friendly conversation.”

Tuesdays, 10:30-11:30am, The Three Wishes, Cheap Street, Sherborne.

One of the key mistakes organisations make in starting down the road to online learning and training is to overvalue the technology and undervalue the role of learning design, leading to the question: does the technology serve the learning or master it?

We may be winning the battle against the luddites, and slowly enticing the technology-timid to change with the times, but are we really doing this right?

It’s worth asking yourself a few questions, before getting out the purchase order:

Why do you need an all-singing all-dancing learning management system (LMS)? What are you going to do with all those features? How do they enable, enhance, support the learning?

What is it you actually want to achieve with your learning programme? What are the best approaches, methods, tools to meet those expectations?  Is it possible that a smorgasmord of “old” or relatively bland technologies might do the job better?

Who is leading the project? Is it technology-led? Or is there a true collaboration between stakeholders?

Keep up on trends by all means, and try out the ones that seem to have promise, but remain flexible and adaptable and don’t have your head turned by every shiny new gadget that crosses your path.

And, above all, make sure you start the planning with expertise in learning design and strategy, before you purchase a big, expensive white elephant that looks pretty but doesn’t actually fit your needs.

It’s easy to lose learners in an online course for a variety of reasons. However, I’ve found in my own experience that some common factors can be mitigated by good planning and learning design.

Feelings of isolation
In any form of distance learning, it is too easy to feel alone and disconnected from others on the same course. Morale slips and the feeling of purpose that drives a learner on can be eroded. Providing collaborative activities, good peer support networks and casual communication links between learners can help keep them on track.

Uncertainty or anxiety about what is expected of them
Whether a course is online or face-to-face, you still need to make sure learning objectives, expectations, requirements, etc, are clearly laid out at appropriate times throughout the course.

Dull learning design
Without the kinds of stimulation provided by group dynamics in a live atmosphere, learning content that isn’t inherently lively and interesting in an online course can be deadly dull. It is vital to be creative in the way that content is presented and the design of activities in which the learners engage.

Lack of communication with tutors
Regular feedback about progress is absolutely crucial in online courses. Tutors/facilitators need to be seen to be engaged in online spaces and responsive to individual queries. This need not be too demanding provided enough attention has been paid in the planning stage to setting out a range of support mechanisms.

Lack of attention to individual learning needs
Learning is ideally an iterative and cyclical process — not just a matter of handing out standardised content and waiting for the correct responses to come back. The most engaging online courses allow learners the space to take responsibility for their own learning and contribute to and shape the course for future learners. In addition, there are diagnostic and adaptive learning tools that can help direct learners to the areas where they need improvement.

Technical problems
Last but not least, learners can drop out due to big frustrations caused by basic technical problems. These might be caused by their own inadequate equipment or internet connection, an unreliable or overly complex learning management system or through lack of training and support. It is important when planning online learning to take into account the likely technical setup of the learners (which may be limited by regional or international situations) and do everything reasonable to help them take part.

—

Sometimes, despite all attempts to engage them, learners drop out due to personal, family or work problems that make it difficult to devote the time and attention to online learning.  All we can do is try to help, show care and support and finally accept their decision.

One of the complaints I hear most often from those who reside outside of the United States is the inability to input foreign addresses on U.S. ecommerce sites. Some companies might not support international sales due to an inability to handle international shipping, import/export regulations or currency conversions. While strategies do exist to overcome these difficulties, that’s a topic for another post.

But what if an out-of-country shopper is simply looking to purchase an item for delivery to a stateside address? Whether it’s a grandchild’s birthday present from American Girl, a wedding gift from Macy’s gift registry, or a simple gift certificate for the Olive Garden, many ecommerce platforms are unable to accept shipping addresses in one country and billing addresses in another. The result: lost revenue for merchants and frustration for shoppers with friends and loved ones in other countries.

Security is one of the main reasons cited for not accepting international billing addresses. Right now, only a few countries support AVS (Address Verification System), an automated process that uses a cardholder’s billing address to verify his or her identity and thus help reduce the risk of fraudulent transactions. However, there are other ways to protect against fraud without limiting sales to residents of the seller’s country.

The following guidelines can help retailers accommodate international customers with minimal effort and expense. And the potential for increased sales and goodwill should more than cover the costs incurred.

1. Revamp the Checkout Process.

In order to accommodate foreign addresses, a Web site will need to be recoded to take regional differences into account, a process known as internationalization. If international delivery is not supported, only the billing address fields will need to be revised. However, messaging informing users about shipping locales and policies must be clearly and prominently displayed.

Victoria’s Secret uses a flexible checkout form that enables shoppers to input billing and shipping addresses for different countries. By asking users to indicate billing & shipping locations prior to providing them, the site is able to tailor the form fields to the user’s specific needs.

HarryandDavid.com, a site specializing in gift baskets, also makes it easy for users to purchase from one country and ship to another. Selecting an option in the “Country” drop-down menu resets the form to one that accepts foreign address formats.

2. Verify billing information manually.

If AVS is not an option, merchants can contact the purchaser’s credit card company to verify the information submitted online. The reduction in abandoned shopping carts should more than make up for any additional time or effort necessary to process sales. Retailers currently requiring shoppers living abroad to call in their orders via telephone will actually experience a decrease in processing time, by keeping the entire purchasing process online.

3. Use an online payment processing service.

If manually verifying billing addresses is not feasible, utilizing an online payment processing service is another way to expand a company’s customer base. With these simple, low cost services, online merchants can offer shoppers around the world a safe and secure environment for inputting their credit card information.

Paypal, the most widely used of these services, enables users to either remain on the seller’s site throughout the entire checkout process or be linked directly to Paypal.com in order to complete their purchase. Major retailers like Barnes and Noble, Cooking.com, and Dell all offer users the option of paying via Paypal.

Amazon Payments, a subsidiary of ecommerce behemoth Amazon.com, provides shoppers access to the payment information stored in their Amazon.com account, ensuring a simple and familiar user experience. Buy.com and JR.com are examples of large online retailers that utilize Amazon Payments in addition to other means of processing ecommerce transactions.

With all these options, even if a site can only handle domestic shipping, there really is no reason to close the door to international shoppers.

When potential customers visit your website and decide to fill in your contact form and click “submit”, they are taking a leap of faith. They have given you something of themselves and trust you to give something back in the form of information or, at the very least, acknowledgment. They are alone in the wilderness until you respond, and if you don’t, you have broken that trust and lost a customer.

And the thing is that you may never know this.

That’s why one of the most important website maintenance tasks you can perform is to test your contact form on a regular basis by actually using it to send yourself a message.

Three common culprits are:

Problem 1: Your form-to-mail script is broken or obsolete

Evidence: When you try to submit the form, you’ll get an error message on the site with technical language that probably includes keywords like “configuration”, “script”, “PHP”, “Perl”, and/or “CGI”. This is a sign of a “server-side” problem.

Solution: If your contact form used to work fine, and you know that nothing has changed on your end, find out if your web hosting service has made recent updates that affect the use of mail forms. If so, they will tell you what to do to get mail forms working again (you may need to use a different script). If not, there may be a temporary glitch in the system.

Problem 2: Your email address has changed or become defunct

Evidence: The message will never arrive in your inbox, or maybe you’ll get a delivery failure notice in your email (unlikely).

Solution: Check the email address in the form script to make sure it’s up-to-date. Better than using an address that directs to a specific person (bob@email.com), use a generic address that can be checked by anyone in the company (contact@email.com) and which won’t become defunct when Bob leaves the company.

Problem 3: Your spam filter is overzealous and intercepting good mail

Evidence: If your email spam filter is set to delete spam automatically, the message will never arrive in your inbox.  If it first goes in a spam folder, you should find your message there.

Solution: Choose a unique keyword to be included in the subject line of emails sent from your contact form, such as the name of your business (this would be done in the code for the contact form itself or in the script) and also set an email filter in your mail programme so that anything with that keyword in the subject line is not labelled spam and will be allowed into the inbox.

Otherwise, it’s a matter of…

Problem 4: Your customer service is crap

Evidence: You’re getting messages and not bothering to respond.

Solution: Pull your socks up and quit losing business that’s coming to you!