business Archives - Page 25 of 36

Is Your Company’s Network Management Sound?

August 26, 2015 by Thomas

Technology is changing rapidly.

Is your business’s network management staying on pace with those changes or falling behind?

The antiquated main IT focus on hardware setup and troubleshooting has morphed to include tasks related to cloud services and more.

Since sound network management is directly linked to effective internal communications and business success, here’s how to ensure yours is staged for success now and in the future:

Consider Information Security

Your top concern regarding the rapidly changing technological landscape must be the security of your company’s information.

Hackers are a dime-a-dozen and information can be compromised on many fronts.

Work with your network management team to pinpoint holes in information security and take rapid action on any concerns that are voiced by the team.

Assess Company Technology Policies

Whether on a work computer, a personal smartphone or another device, employees can now access thousands of apps and software programs with ease.

This shift in available technology has softened the edges of once-strict company technology policies.

Workers who once feared the wrath of their IT department after downloading software without permission now don’t see the problem of installing an app for the transfer of company photography or of using an online spreadsheet program for the input of company data.

Before the use of such software at your company gets out of hand and possibly compromises the business’s security, take a hard look at your technology policy.

Assess whether the policy addresses the latest evolution in smartphone apps and other technologies and work with your network management team to revise the policy as needed.

Look to the Future Workspace

Employees who sit at desks in the office from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day are quickly becoming the exception rather than the norm.

Flex and telecommuting policies are changing the way people work.

This workspace revolution is also changing the standards tasks that are associated with network management.

Just a few of the issues to consider regarding your company’s future workspace include how to deal with employees working from their private computers, how cloud services will change the way you do business and more.

Rather than ignoring these impending changes, face them head on to keep your network management one step ahead of the game.

Hire Innovators

If you are asking the question as the article, “Are you ready for the next generation of network management?” looks at, take an overview of your current workforce and consider the answer to that question.

If your company has an in-house IT department, consider the best professionals to hire into the department who can help lead your network into the next generation.

If your network management is outsourced, take a close look at how it’s being managed and if changes are needed.

By placing your network management into the hands of innovators, you can rest easier knowing it will stay in step with the future of business technologies.

Is your business ready for the next generation of network management?

Answer that question with confidence by considering the security of your company’s sensitive information, by assessing the business’s technology policies and more.

By taking action on the network’s weak spots now, you can keep pace with future changes in the technological landscape.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Shayla Ebsen is a freelance writer and editor with more than 10 years of professional writing experience both in the corporate and freelance settings.

Should You Be Dialed-in to After Call Surveys?

August 19, 2015 by Thomas

If you have ever been asked to provide your opinion or give feedback after you complete a call, you have just been involved in an after-call survey.

You may wonder if these surveys provide any value to the business, especially if you were one who elected not to participate.

Do they have any value in today’s business world? If so, what do you need to know to make them effective?

Know What You Want to Learn

There should be a reason for everything you do in business, and after-call surveys are no exception.

You should know what information you want to find out, how you will learn this information and what you will do with it. If you do not have answers to all of these questions, you don’t need to take a survey.

Creating a goal doesn’t need to be complicated. In fact, for these surveys, you should keep it simple.

Learn which call agents receive the best marks in customer satisfaction. Find out what percentage of customers have their problems answered when they call.

Keep your goals to one or two points to ensure that you get the information you are looking for.

Know What to Ask

Even if you know what you want to find out in these surveys, you won’t get the information if you don’t ask the right questions.

Make sure the questions are straightforward with enough options for the customer to answer accurately, but don’t overwhelm the person.

You cannot get feedback for complicated issues in this manner; keep your expectations simple and your questions easy to answer. You will use these surveys to gauge perception about general topics.

This may include finding out if the customer had a long wait time, if his or her questions were answered and if he or she was treated courteously.

Know How You Will Use the Data

Customers don’t mind filling out surveys or answering questions if they know their answers make a difference. They want to see that you make changes in your business based on the information they provide.

You should know before starting a survey what actions you will take with the results.

Obviously, if everything comes back positive, you won’t need to make changes. If you have less than desirable results, you should have a plan of what you will change.

As the article, “After Call Surveys: Are They Really Effective?” mentions, you should have a plan to follow up on any negative feedback.

You may even want to implement a mailed survey or contact specific customers if the reaction is strong enough.

The goal of any survey should be to make your business stronger, better and to improve customer satisfaction. When you accumulate information directly from the customer, this is your best weapon to improving your services or product.

Take your survey results seriously and they will be a valuable tool to help ensure that you retain customer loyalty so that your business thrives.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Joyce Morse is an author who writes on a variety of topics, including customer service and technology.

Build Your Online Portfolio from the Ground Up

August 12, 2015 by Thomas

Is your online portfolio ready to impress?

With potential employers checking out new hires online, having an online portfolio makes good business sense, providing a valuable introduction to your skills.

Your choice of information and how you organize it could make the difference between being hired and being overlooked, so just what should you include?

Start with these six things:

Lead Off with an Introduction

Visitors want to get a feel for the person behind the portfolio, so be sure to include an introduction.

Your introduction should inspire confidence, giving a brief background on what you do, and who you are. Keep it short, but relatable. Your visitors are interested in the person you are and what you are like to work with – you don’t need to include your life story.

Industry Awareness

As the article “The Power and Impact of an Online Portfolio” points out, it’s a good idea to start by asking yourself about the expectations within your industry.

What skills, qualifications and personal attributes are employers in your industry looking for?

By cultivating an awareness of what employers want, you can tailor your profile to make sure it answers those needs.

Clear Focus

Avoid confusion by keeping your focus clear.

An overcrowded portfolio will fail to make an impact. Instead, summarize your key skills in one or two sentences that will leave visitors in no doubt as to what they’ll get when they work with you.

Be sure to include a strong introduction, an easy to browse selection of your work, a clear call to action to encourage contact, and visible contact details to facilitate that.

Qualified Statements

The maxim “show, don’t tell” holds true when it comes to your online portfolio. It’s not enough to simply list what you’ve done – details about your achievements are a must.

For example, if you re-designed a website for a restaurant, don’t just show your design. Talk about how many more visitors they got as a result, or how much revenue increased after it went live.

Leave your visitors with a clear impression of what you can achieve for them when they hire you.

Your Best Work

Choose your work for your portfolio carefully.

This is your chance to show your best work. It can be tempting to include everything you’ve done. However, it makes better business sense to take the opportunity to showcase the best of your work.

As well as choosing your best work, be sure to include some background on each project, such as the remit for each one and how you set about completing it.

Provide the Right Layout

Layout matters when it comes to your online portfolio.

The focus should be on your work, not on the layout surrounding it. Aim for a clear, professional look that easily draws attention to what you want to say.

Your portfolio should be easy to browse, leaving your reader free to focus on the quality of your work.

Make sure your portfolio is mobile-friendly too, or you could risk losing mobile visitors.

Your online portfolio gives you an opportunity to make your first impression count.

Take the time to plan and build it with this in mind so potential employers will like what they see when they visit your online home.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Tristan Anwyn is an author who writes on a range of topics including social media, SEO that works, and careers.

Take Your Resume on the Road

August 5, 2015 by Thomas

Don’t automatically turn down the idea of taking a gap year in between college and your first professional job.

If you spend that time traveling, you could be looking at better job opportunities on the horizon than if you go straight from college dorm to cubicle norm.

Here are some great reasons to fill your backpack and roam if you want to:

You Can Demonstrate Your Independence

Many employers complain that kids go from living at home to living on campus and then starting their first professional job without ever having to be independent. They then end up with young employees who don’t know how to manage their time at work, and can’t manage project tasks without asking everyone within sight for help.

When you do some traveling either solo or with a buddy, you can prove to interviewers that you know how to take matters into your own hands and take care of yourself without your parents’ help.

That says a lot for a 20-something, and it will help distinguish you from other job candidates.

Your Resume Will Grow

If your only jobs prior to college graduation were part time gigs like pizza delivery guy or dog walker, your resume is probably full of a whole bunch of white space. You need to find some way to bulk up your resume so it looks like you’ve actually done something worthwhile.

As the following article looks at, here is how travel enhances your resume.

You can add all the places you traveled to, new skills that you learned along the way, and include some references of places you stayed, such as bed and breakfasts, hostels, etc. If you picked up a new language during your travels, add that to your resume, too.

More to Discuss During the Interview

Interviews can get downright terrifying, especially when your interviewer asks you something, you answer with a couple brief words, and they say nothing more. It’s like they’re waiting for you to fill the empty air, but all you can hear are crickets.

As someone with some traveling under your heels, you won’t be short of stories to tell of your adventures.

You’ll find some way to integrate your travel tales with the job requirements your boss is looking for. Is he looking for a problem solver? Tell him or her about the time your taxi driver didn’t show up, but you made it to the airport anyway.

Is he or she looking for an arbitrator? Tell them all about your haggling skills in the open markets in Morocco.

You’ll Become More Worldly

There’s nothing more boring than a person who’s never been away from their hometown.

If a person doesn’t travel, they have little to no way to truly understand people or world events. There’s just no context in life unless you actually venture outside your front door.

A worldly person can make conversation with just about anyone on some topic or another.

As a job candidate – even one only recently out of college – you’ll exude more confidence and worldly experience if you take some time to travel before you settle in to a professional job.

Don’t let others dissuade you from traveling when you’re young and out of college. There’s no better time to see the world.

This is a time of life when you have no ties, no commitments, and no timeframe when you have to get back.

Roam around the world and come back a better person.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Kate Supino is an experienced traveler and recommends it to anyone who is the least bit curious about the world.

Do Your Workers Need More Education?

July 30, 2015 by Thomas

If you are reviewing your employee benefits package, you may want to consider continuing education.

While not one of the traditional components of benefits packages for employees, it is an attractive addition.

People like the idea of getting education for free to help their careers and income potential to grow.

Benefits for Employers

Offering continuing education doesn’t just benefit the employee; it provides advantages the employer as well.

The most obvious advantage is the fact that you can promote from within when a higher position opens up. Instead of hiring strangers to take a supervisory position, you can place someone you already know and trust in that job.

It also helps reduce the cost of turnover because employees are more likely to stay with an employer if they feel they can continue to grow and advance.

They also know that they will make more money if they can promote up through the department or even move into a new department within the same company.

Happy Customers

The better trained your staff is, the better satisfied your customers will be.

This translates into more revenue for you. Even small businesses can benefit from helping their employees get more education.

For example, say you own a beauty salon.

As the following article looks at, by offering your staff the opportunity to take cosmetology online classes, they can learn new techniques or expand their knowledge while continuing to work. They can sell their new skills to customers in the form of additional services.

This concept works for just about any small business, so explore how it can help your company.

Are There Any Downsides?

Even if you can see all of the advantages to offering employees continuing education, you may wonder about the downside. The first is the cost.

Of course, you can limit the cost by offering to pay only for tuition or for a portion of the tuition.

To prevent your employees from getting the training and then leaving immediately, you can also include a requirement of service for a reasonable period of time.

For instance, an employee may need to be employed for at least a year and plan to stay at least a year after completion of education.

The other big disadvantage to employers is that employees have gained new skills that they can take elsewhere. However, this is not as big of a problem as you might think.

By offering educational help as part of the employee benefits, you show that your business cares about the people who work there. It inspires loyalty in the staff and the employees are less likely to leave.

People who make a decent salary and have the opportunities to grow and face new challenges in their jobs are less likely to look elsewhere for jobs.

Instead, they will turn their focus inward when they are ready to make changes.

By offering continuing education to employees, you equip them to become even more valuable to your organization and encourage them to stay and share their new skills with your company.

Photo credits: Images courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net and Got Credit

About the Author: Joyce Morse is an author who writes on a variety of topics, including business and education.

Time to Automate Your Social Media?

March 4, 2015 by Thomas

Social media has been proven to be an effective tool for performing a wide range of business tasks, from marketing to recruiting. As such, businesses around the world are adopting social media at a rapid rate.

If you have already joined the social media fray, you should know that you need to invest a substantial amount of time and effort in order to be successful on social media. One thing you can do to make your social media activities easier and less time-consuming is to use social media automation tools.

Here is a look at three great tools that you can use to automate your social media efforts.

Post Planner

If you want to promote your business and engage with consumers effectively on social media, you have to make a point to share interesting and helpful content regularly.

Post Planner can help you save time and effort by automating the publishing of content on your Facebook page.

This tool enables you to publish content based on a predetermined time schedule; target your content based on details such as age group, gender and education level; look for trending content and add it to your queue; crowd-source content from other people who use Post Planner; access a database with thousands of updates to find new ideas for updating your status; and upload bulk posts.

Additionally, it can perform simple analytics to show you the percentage of users who “liked”, clicked or commented on a certain post.

According to the article, “3 Great Tools to Automate Your Social Media“, Post Planner comes in four different versions, including the free Pro Planner and the paid Guru, Master and Agency plans.

Dlvr.it

When you have new content to share, you want to post it on all your social media channels. However, it can be time-consuming to do this if you have many posts to share on a regular basis.

Dlvr.it is a tool that you can use to deliver content to multiple social media networks.

All you need to do is specify the source and destination of the content. Whenever you create a new post, Dlvr.it will send out your updates automatically.

Currently, this social media automation tool supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Delicious and App.net.

Social Oomph

Evergreen content is content that will not be outdated.

As your social media following grows, you will have fans or followers who have never seen some of your previously posted content. So, when you post content that is evergreen, you should continue to share it in the future.

Social Oomph features a queue reservoir that allows you to add content that you want to re-share to a queue, and you can specify how often the content should be shared.

Also, you can create variations of a post, so that you will not send out identical posts when you re-share content. Social Oomph can also help you find the right people to follow and monitor your social media activities.

Social media automation tools are becoming more advanced and useful.

If you do not have enough time to manage your social media activities, you should try using one of these tools.

Photo credit: Image courtesy of ddpavumba at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About the Author: John McMalcolm is a freelance writer who writes on a wide range of subjects, from social media marketing to Cloud computing.