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Technology

Tip of the Week: Technology Has Your Business Covered

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Technology is an easy thing to take for granted, especially in an office that has countless solutions that are utilized on a regular basis. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small retail establishment, a large organization with multiple offices, or a factory to produce consumer items. Today, we’ll look at the various ways your business is changed for the better thanks to the use of technology.

Customer Service
Your customers are one of your most valuable assets, so it’s natural that you want to build a powerful bond with them. If you can’t support the products you sell to them, you’ll have a difficult time keeping your business in good standing with both current and prospective clients. Technology can help you maintain this positive relationship through the use of a ticketing system to handle customer complaints and concerns, and it also makes it easy to handle support for various services you might offer.

Social media and social networking in general provides businesses with more direct ways of interacting with consumers. Sites like Facebook and Twitter essentially offer a platform to promote a brand and knowledge base. Of course, this advantage can quickly become a detriment if it’s not managed properly, as you’re (again) dealing directly with customers–if they aren’t satisfied by your interaction, they’re more likely to share it and complicate public relations.

Productivity
To be successful as a business, you have to accrue money somehow. This is where productivity comes in–technology helps by enabling workers to get more done throughout the workday, building more value for your organization in the long run. For example, time-tracking software can help with task scheduling, giving employees the opportunity to accomplish more during the time they spend in the office. Moreover, you’ll be able to assign a monetary value to the time your employees spend on various tasks and streamline their work processes.

Many of today’s most helpful technology solutions come with built-in productivity solutions that allow for collaboration through the cloud. These cloud-hosted applications provide flexibility to workers so they can communicate in the way most efficient for them. Since these solutions are flexible and scalable, your business can adjust them as needed.

Finance
Money is a big part of why you’re in business, but you can’t do anything without funding of your own. You have a bottom line to keep in mind, after all. Technology can help businesses better manage their finances through online invoicing services to collect payments and reduce paper expenses. If you use software to manage payroll and other accounts, you’ll be able to handle them easily and more efficiently. If you can streamline these processes at all, your business can run much better and you’ll be better off in the long run.

Security
Security plays a critical role in the sustainability of your business, both on your network and in your physical office. You can’t let workers or other entities waltz around your network and your office uninhibited, as the opportunity to cause major damage is practically omnipresent in today’s business world. You need to implement not only network security solutions such as antivirus, firewall, content filtering, and spam blocking technology, but physical security solutions like security cameras, biometric security locks, and other measures as well. Doing so ensures the protection of all your business’ assets, whether it’s from a hacker or a careless employee.

A lot goes into making a business successful, and technology plays a large role in doing so. How does your business use technology? COMPANYNAME can help you get started thinking about the future for your organization. To learn more, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

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Business

Why Your Business Needs to Define Its Ethical Code

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As the technology that businesses have available to them develops, so does the propensity for this technology to be used unethically. This has become especially apparent where data collection is concerned, and what that data is used for after it has been collected. How can you keep operations moving both productively, and ethically?

Collection Concerns
Data collection is one of the current big concerns in technology. With another newsworthy data breach practically every other day, companies that accumulate data for seemingly little reason effectively put their clients and customers at a greater risk of having this data stolen. Reflecting upon this, it is no wonder that 75 percent of consumers are concerned about brands keeping track of their browsing habits.

Facebook has been the focus of some negative attention in past months thanks to these concerns. In addition to the Cambridge Analytica situation, Facebook has adopted artificial intelligence technologies to analyze their users. This analysis is used to predict future behaviors, these insights being sold to advertisers. While this brings up many legitimate concerns about data privacy, it also introduces a different topic: the need for a code of ethics surrounding the use of collected data, as well as how much data is collected.

Why This Is a Real Issue
It should come as no surprise that businesses and individuals have different priorities, and that these different priorities shape their ethics in different ways. Likewise, the primary purpose of any business is to generate revenue through profit. Therefore, it only makes sense that a business as a unit would have the motivation to collect as much data as they can – after all, the more data available, the more insights that could be presumably be gleaned, and the more successful the business would be… in theory.

However, as mentioned above, many businesses seem to collect as much data as they can just so they can have it. This is not a great approach for them to take for a few reasons. Most obviously, because it just enables more data to be compromised if a breach was to occur.

Without the guidance of a code of ethics leading your business decisions, the likelihood of risking your clients’ data for the sake of advancement – be it more insight, improved automation and artificial intelligence, or another business goal – becomes much higher.

Enforcing Ethics
In order to create a workplace that is in alignment with your determined ethics, you need to make sure of two things. One, that you clearly establish and share them within your business so that your employees are on the same page as you are, and two, that you stand by these ethics.

To accomplish this, learning your company’s ethics should be a part of an employee’s onboarding process, with a written document leaving no questions as to what will and won’t be tolerated. Then, you need to make sure that you not only listen when ethical violations are reported, but also allow those reporting them to remain anonymous.

What would be the most important aspect of your policy for employees to follow? Share it in the comments!

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Personalities are Key to Successful Networking

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Almost everyone has, at one time, worked with someone with whom their personality clashed, whether they did not get along or just didn’t work effectively together. While this is a perfectly natural phenomenon of both nature and nurturing, it is best to put personal differences aside when forming a professional relationship with a coworker.

This was the focus of Networking Like a Pro , a publication by Dr. Ivan Misner and Brian Hilliard. In it, they explore how personalities come into play in the workplace, and how each person’s behaviors influence their interpersonal relationships. While most people display the traits of many personality types, the book makes the assertion that all people fall into four predominant personality types, especially where business is involved. Business networking is strongly influenced by how well your behavioral type meshes with another’s.

So, does this mean that you just won’t be able to network with some people, and with others it will be effortless? Not so.

Misner and Hilliard offer advice on how to best interact with these behavioral types by understanding what really makes them tick. These types are as follows: Go-Getters, Nurturers, Examiners, and Promoters.

Go-Getters
When dealing with a Go-Getter, you have to think–and move–fast. The Go-Getter is determined to get the results they are looking for ASAP, and if the rules need to be bent in order to get them, so be it.

To communicate with a Go-Getter, you need to make the value that you offer them clearly relevant and essential to their goals. More specifically, you need to make them see how you can help speed up their operations without sacrificing the results they strive for. The Go-Getter will also want to hear that they have options to choose from, but would rather hear a pitch than they would a heavily-planned-out script. With a Go-Getter, stick to the highlights, and deliver on your promises.

Nurturers
Where a Go-Getter has more of a “now, if not sooner” attitude, a Nurturer sees the value in taking their time where business matters are concerned, operating with patience. Nurturers are also natural team players, surrounding themselves with supportive allies and willing to offer assistance wherever it is needed. They can be overly tolerant, however, willing to endure a less-than-ideal situation than ready to take a risk to change it.

Honesty is the best policy when working with a Nurturer. To work with them, you will first need to build their trust. You can help this process along by gently guiding them toward a mutually beneficial solution. To accomplish this, you also need to maintain contact with the Nurturer, regularly providing evidence as to how a business relationship with you can provide simplicity and support.

Examiners
A born skeptic, an Examiner will thoroughly examine and evaluate everything that they may work with–including the people. They will unsurprisingly be predisposed to perfectionism, and at the very least, are very thorough. The Examiner is a strong conversationalist, as they use their stores of knowledge and information to their advantage. Efficiency is also a virtue to the Examiner, and so they will move on once their objective has been met, whether that is to the next assignment or to the next event.

As you build a connection with an Examiner, you need to be concise and clear about your position and why it is worth their time to be involved. Lean on facts and evidence to make your point, and only use small talk and stories if they add to the evidence that you are a dependable provider. You need to be sure that you put your best foot forward when interacting with an Examiner, as they will be forming a very strong opinion of you from the get-go.

Promoters
A Promoter is a salesman, usually an extrovert, and a thought leader. They have the drive to spread any good idea they find, more often identifying them instinctively than through research-based evidence. Promoters often attend industry events to network and socialize. They are usually juggling many different projects, and are rarely confrontational.

Communicating with a Promoter requires you to match their speed and align your needs with their priorities. One such priority is their professional image, so you need to make sure that your offer increases their visibility in the industry. As you deal with a Promoter, make sure that you document the finer details of your agreements in writing, and you fulfil your end of the bargain promptly and professionally. Furthermore, you should always give a Promoter plenty of help whenever it is required to prove that you are the best choice for their needs.

These strategies should enable you to network more directly, with the end result being more business relationships that provide mutual benefit. Which of these personality types do you think you most embody? Tell us in the comments!

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Casserly Consulting Blog

9 Ingredients to Creating a Winning UCC Strategy

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If there is one thing that supports everything a successful business does, it has to be communication. Any company relies on its communications to ensure that its clients are satisfied with their services, and as communications have improved, it has only become easier for a unified communication and collaboration, or UCC, strategy to take form.

With these strategies, businesses have been able to expand upon their capabilities to enter and embrace the digital age. What follows are ten elements that a UCC would commonly feature in a business setting.

Collaborative Software
It is essentially guaranteed that you have some experience with collaborative software in this day and age, even if you haven’t personally used it to its full potential. With Microsoft Office and the G Suite available almost anywhere, the idea of collaborative software is not a new one. However, there are many more solutions out there that allow for many people to pool their skills and talents into a particular project in real time, regardless of how far away they are from each other. Many of these solutions also enable video conferencing and instant messaging, which will be discussed in greater depth later.

Podcasts
Imagine giving a presentation where the audience could pause you and wait until a more opportune time to listen to the rest of what you had to say. This is exactly what a podcast delivers–an on-demand lecture on a topic that an audience can listen to at their own convenience. Podcasts are also a more personal method of communication, as many listen through the intimate channel that is the headphone. If you are considering delivering your own podcast, you should be sure that you have these five needs planned out beforehand:

  1. Topic
  2. Length
  3. Frequency
  4. Format
  5. Distribution

Instant Messaging
When it comes to rapid communication, you don’t get much faster than ‘instant.’ Businesses have picked up on this and now leverage instant messaging as a communications method. With utility as a communication device between individuals as well as among groups of people, instant messaging lives up to its name with the capability for near-instantaneous response times as individuals communicate with each other. In addition, companies that have used instant messaging in the workplace have seen increased efficiency and collaboration, as well as a reduction in email.

Video Conferencing
While it is certainly not a new technology, the practicality of video conferencing has increased significantly over the past few years. Better technology and improved Internet speeds mean that communications can happen in real time from almost anywhere in the world. Not to mention that, according to the IDG Enterprise Video Conferencing Trends in 2016, 96 percent of those surveyed agreed that video conferencing improves productivity and can reduce travel costs by 30 percent.

Discussion Forums
Sometimes a user would rather crowdsource their answers from their fellow users than bother the original source. Providing these users with an outlet to share their issues with each other allows them to identify their most pressing concerns, and also tells you what needs to be resolved or addressed first. You and your team can also step in and provide a solution to these issues, establishing yourselves as thought leaders.

Another benefit of discussion forums is that you are able to collect demographic information from your visitors here as well, enabling you to create a more complete idea of who your visitors are, and which groups seek information on which topics.

Email
While email may have once been seen solely as a means of sending and receiving messages with an individual or group, it is now relied upon as the primary record for over three-quarters of business correspondence. Archived emails help businesses keep track of their transactions, and incomplete email records have been the downfall of some companies in legal matters.

Clearly, email needs to be a component of your UCC. However, you will want to ensure that your selected email solution is properly secured, has searchable archives, is mobile-friendly, and integrates with your other solutions as much as is possible.

Enterprise Social Networking
While social media may have a less-than-shining reputation as a distraction in a workplace setting, Enterprise Social Networking works to the opposite effect. A company can leverage social media to help develop external business opportunities and to promote internal collaboration and communication. Furthermore, employees can be encouraged to act as brand ambassadors, using social media to share company culture posts and boost audience engagement–a strategy that more and more businesses are adopting.

With a UCC, a business has a variety of collaborative and communicative solutions to choose from, and many line-of-business applications incorporate enterprise social media platforms.

ChatBots
ChatBots can serve as a very helpful communication tool for the modern business and its website. Often structured in a way that is similar to an instant message, a ChatBot combines AI and human intelligence to improve the customer’s experience through a few common features.

  1. Engagement – One of a business website’s key roles is to engage with its visitors so they will interact with the website. A ChatBot is an always-present opportunity to engage, with the benefit of providing your site visitor with information and assistance.
  2. Personalization – As one of your visitors uses your ChatBot, they will likely give you a pretty good idea of why they are visiting. This allows you to customize your sales approach for their company, as well as to track and evaluate user behavior to deem which types of content are the most impactful to your strategy.
  3. User Experience – Most businesses have an unofficial list of the questions that everyone asks. ChatBots can make that list official, with set responses that are activated by certain keywords in your visitor’s inquiry.

Project Management Software
In order for a business to be successful, it needs to be successfully managed. This is why 77 percent of businesses leverage project management software, as it encourages collaboration among team members, improved organization, and an overall boost to performance. This variety of software is also used by 66 percent of organizations to communicate with their clients.

UCC has grown significantly in popularity as the technology that supports it has developed. For more information on Unified Communication and Collaboration solutions and their place in your business, call us at PHONENUMBER.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Tip of the Week: 10 Technology Practices To Improve Business As Usual

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In a business, some jobs belong to certain people: managers make sure that work is done when it needs to be, human resources make sure the workforce is accounted for, and so on. However, some jobs belong to everyone in the modern workplace who works with technology, For our tip of the week, we’ll go over some of these shared responsibilities.

Use the Network
As an insurance policy for your data, make sure that everything is saved to the network, and not on your local PC. This is simply a function of risk management–the network is backed up, while it’s much less likely that your individual PC is. Therefore, by storing data on the network, it won’t be lost if your workstation breaks down–and if your network is properly backed up, your data will still be safe.

Check Email Cognizantly
It is only too easy to click through email messages without really getting the message, which only helps those who use email as a cyber weapon. The easiest way to avoid falling victim to such attacks is to avoid opening attachments from unfamiliar senders. This is a favorite method of cyber criminals to introduce malware into their victims’ networks, so your best bet is to avoid any unexpected attachments.

Let Data Be
Keep your data safe by keeping it in-house where it is secured and backed up, and not uploading it onto your portable device or media storage. Without the protections put in place by the network, your data is much more vulnerable to peeking eyes or meddlesome actions.

Leverage Cloud Technology
If you must access data from outside the network, use a secure cloud solution to do so. The cloud has much more to protect it than a pocket-sized media device does. Ideally, you would also be accessing the cloud via a company virtual private network, as well.

Use Secure Passwords
As much as you love your dog or can remember your make and model of car, these don’t make secure passwords. It wouldn’t take long for someone who knew a little about you to try those exact variables. Instead, use a unique sequence of letters, numbers, and symbols for each account. If you can’t remember more than one password, try using a password manager. At the very least, use passphrases instead of passwords–instead of using a password like ‘FidoMazzerati,’ make a passphrase like ‘FidoLovesToRideInTheM@zzer@ti.’

Keep Passwords To Yourself
After going through the trouble to create a password that is complex enough to satisfy the previous rule, why share it with someone who could easily take advantage of it, or pass it to someone who will? As an example, take your Social Security Number, or other unique form of identification. You wouldn’t pass that around to people, but it essentially serves the same purpose as a password.

Lock Your Workstation
It doesn’t matter whether the risk is of someone stealing data or of someone messing around with your workstation as a prank–either way, productivity and focus in the office will suffer. One of the easiest means of avoiding this is to develop the habit of locking your workstation whenever you step away.

Take Note Of All Issues
Computer problems are bound to happen at some point. It helps to be prepared to fix them when they do. Whenever you encounter an issue, take notes that describe exactly what you were doing so the IT professional can figure out if there’s an underlying issue, and when possible, include a screenshot of the error.

Let IT Handle It
Your computer and the software it relies on will need to be upgraded and, eventually, replaced. When that time comes, don’t take it upon yourself to make any changes in the attempt to save someone else the trouble. Call IT in to help — it is one of the reasons they’re there.

However, many businesses don’t have the resources to hire the IT staff they need. That’s why managed services are part of our offering here at COMPANYNAME. We can help you monitor and maintain your IT–we’re just a call to PHONENUMBER away.

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Business

Why FitBit’s Purchase of Pebble Matters to Businesses

b2ap3_thumbnail_pebble_unsupported_400.jpg Smartwatch enthusiasts now have one less brand from which to select, as rival Fitbit has successfully taken over the former Kickstarter project Pebble’s business. For companies that rely on software for their mission-critical tasks, lessons learned from the end of Pebble reminds business owners that, when it comes to innovative technology purchases, there is always a bit of risk.

First, some background: Pebble made the announcement on its Kickstarter page that “due to various factors,” the company “could no longer operate as an independent entity” and had “made the tough decision to shut down the company” after Fitbit completed the purchase of some of Pebble’s assets. The company went on to disclose that they would no longer be continuing any hardware operations, ceasing the production of their wearable products.

As for the devices that had already been sold, Pebble advised their customers that their devices “will work normally for now.” However, since what remains of the company will no longer release software updates, the devices will quickly become vulnerable to malicious threats until they gradually become totally obsolete. These devices are also no longer eligible to be returned or exchanged, leaving their users stuck with a device with a considerably-shortened shelf life, and with no financial recompense.

In short, it’s clear that out of all parties affected by this buyout, it’s the users who are left with the short end of the stick; stuck with insecure electronic devices that they may have contributed a significant financial investment towards, and without warranty.

While this transaction will likely have little effect on a business, it’s worth considering the ramifications of tech companies engaging in similar deals.

For example, let’s say your workplace is exclusively equipped with desktop solutions from Company A. One day, it’s suddenly announced that Company B has come in and bought Company A, and is ending support for Company A’s products. As a result, your office is now filled with unsupported devices that will become obsolete much quicker than anticipated, with an increased susceptibility to security threats after support has ended. Sure, you could update your workstations, but it would be costly to receive customized support.

If you want to be protected against the whims of the tech industry, give COMPANYNAME a call at PHONENUMBER. We can keep your systems maintained with a managed services solution, and an eye on the industry to help you roll a bit better with the punches.