Customer Support Leaders podcast in the making! – Part 4

Customer Support Leaders podcast in the making! – Part 4

“Where?” answered (sort of).

It’s a quarter to one in the morning. Nearly 1am. And I’ve just started typing this week’s article.

Why so late?

Well, it’s kind of a weird week, isn’t it? That week between Christmas and New Year. No-one really knows what day it is. Today is, apparently, Saturday. Or it was, until 45 minutes ago. That means I’m precisely 45 minutes past my personally-set and enforced deadline of publishing this article. Never mind starting it.

I’ve just finished watching the 1968 “Oliver!” musical with my eldest, ten-year-old, son. We recently finished reading the original novel by Charles Dickens (full, unabridged, so proud he stuck with it, despite my awful accents), and I wanted to reward him by quickly following that achievement with the jolly jape, and sometimes quite dark, musical feast.

I had intended to watch the film in two parts, over tonight and tomorrow.

But, he was loving it so much, that he actually asked to finish the film instead of play on his iPad. How the heck could I say no? So, we finished it, despite a wibbly feeling in my mind that my article might be late.

The problem is, that I’m persistent and a finisher. There’s no way I could let this week slide, despite being almost entirely unable to maintain a grip on its temporal extremities.

So, dedicated that I am, and work-from-homer that I am, too, it’s easy enough, relatively speaking, to pick up my laptop at an odd time and see what happens. 

That’s part of the answer of ‘Where’, as it related to the Customer Support Leaders podcast. 

Most of the ‘Where’ happens in my home office. I work exclusively from home, and have done for the last 15 or more years. 

I’m a huge advocate of remote working, flexible working, and all things other than sit-in-the-office-pretending-to-working. My own form of flexibility means that it’s easy for me to bend and stretch my days and weeks to suit whatever client, or customer or creative whim holds firm on my curiosity. 

This flexibility of working patterns, both location and hours, allows me to forge and form strong working relationships, and friendships, with clients and colleagues from around the globe. I’m as likely to speak to someone in London as Lisbon. Or Windsor or Wellington. Or Berlin or Bangalore. Or Southampton as San Francisco. 

And so it goes with my interviewees on the podcast. They are globally disparate; they are worldly-wise; they are universally industrious; and they are astronomically and unwaveringly generous with their wisdom and time. 

It’s pretty amazing to get to speak to so many folks around the world, across borders and timezones and industries, about the key trends and ideals and challenges facing the Customer Support industry right now. I couldn’t do it, if it weren’t for my home-base. 

And I certainly wouldn’t be writing an article at 1am.

But that’s where I am.