Every Friday, we select a few articles from the week that we think are worth your time as a construction financial manager (CFM). We look for compelling articles not only about financial topics, but about business, technology, and life, that challenges you to think about your role as a CFM in different ways. We’d love to hear from you about how we’re doing, and to have you join our community by subscribing to receive this weekly post by email. Follow #CFMReview.
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How to deal with bad customers
Bad customers: we all encounter them. Some of us more often than others, and when your job (or your employees’ jobs) is to ask people for money, that probably means more often.
The common reaction to being mistreated is to think over it and talk it out until you’ve gotten the experience out of your system. But a study conducted in 2011 showed that ruminating on negative encounters can be bad for you and produce more stress. Not surprisingly, this influences the way we speak to customers (and not in a good way).
So what’s the solution? Give employees a pillow to punch and a room to scream in? Wrong. Physically venting your frustration, it turns out, is not much different from doing it verbally. Paul Jun at Help Scout, a customer experience help desk, concludes that it’s important to quickly move on from a bad encounter, but that some form of guided rumination (i.e. “feedback and mentoring sessions”) is also necessary for employees to manage their emotions.
Read the article to learn more: How to Recover After a Long Day of Support
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Machine learning does more for you than you think
I wrote about smart machines last week, and I couldn’t resist doing it again. (What can I say? I like the subject.)
When many of us think about machine learning, we think of iRobots taking over the world. But it’s a phenomena more present in our lives than many would expect. Netflix recommendations, Facebook facial recognition, Google Spreadsheets’ filling in blank cells—all of these rely on machine learning.
So why is this important for a credit professional? Machine learning is improving accounting systems, for SMBs and Fortune 500s alike. Tradeshift CloudScan, for example, maps information from static Excel files and PDFs into structured accounting formats. Every time the product works, it learns from it and uses that knowledge get better at mapping and filling in blanks, saving you the time and hassle of data-entry. Moreover, it uses that learning to benefit every company in the CloudScan network.
Gert Sylvest at Tradeshift also spells out a vision in which these machines help users make smarter decisions with automated workflows, a vision we at zlien are working to realize in Construction Finance.
Read the article: Machine learning’s hand in touch-less, straight-through processing and beyond
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14 Witty Jokes for the Grammar Nerd In Your Life, from Hubspot
Let your punny side shine.
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