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7 Tips
for Excellent Customer Service
By Jeff Wuorio
Reprinted with permission
from the Microsoft Small Business Center at
http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness
In the business
world, good customer service often isn't good enough anymore.
Customers and clients are becoming increasingly disenchanted
with the merely adequate. For them, extraordinary service
is the rule, not the exception. Anything less, and they're
happy to vote with their feet and their wallets.
That makes extraordinary
service necessary, not just desirable. And that, in turn,
mandates a strategy to help ensure that your business matches
that standout service standard on a daily basis.
Here
are seven ideas and tips to help your business establish and
maintain an ongoing climate of service excellence.
Secure 3G Wireless Broadband
Networking in an Instant
Organizations
depend on high-speed broadband Internet connections for maximum
employee productivity, and for exchanging confidential customer
information and sensitive business data. In many instances
this requires an Internet connection in areas where wired
networks -- DSL, leased line, ISDN and others --are unavailable
or require time consuming installation and provisioning.
The SonicWALL®
TZ 190, featuring a deep packet inspection architecture, enables
organizations to establish secure 3G wireless broadband network
access in an instant without the need for a wired Internet
connection. By leveraging recent advances in 3G wireless broadband
technologies, organizations can rapidly establish high-speed
access for seasonal kiosks, mobile point-of-sale stations,
portable ATM machines, disaster recovery networks and more.
See
the Product Brochure!
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| Balancing
life in today’s Internet age
It’s a little
past 2am, my day is almost done, I just tucked 8 of
my children into bed. Well they may not have all been
physically wrapped, hugged and kissed goodnight, but
my moments of thinking of each one, their daily wins
and losses comes clearly to mind, and with that I call
it a day.
How do we
all do it? Our new found technology forces it. In the
flash of a second our days are turned inside out, crisis
start, others end, faster than anyone could have imagined
just 10 years ago. We are tightly connected to the lives
of all we know, in a blink, we are taken off track,
and just as fast we use the same tools and technologies
to quickly put things back in order and on the list.
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The
blitz of media, our plasma TV, notebooks and mobile
offices on our hip, all keep propelling us at some warp
speed toward a distant point. None of it has eased our
life, only changed it. I am certain the only place left
to put a mobile computing device is in my shower. It
is the last place on earth I can hide, but then I keep
an active white board used with waterproof markers in
there with me so I guess its next. Work-life balance?
My
point? We must use it all to keep the really important
things in life close to us. The center of my life, my
wife and family never leave me alone, my hundreds of
clients, and scores of important friends all access
me in one way or another, all the time. As time goes
on I realize this is my life and that all our technology
tools do serve a purpose. It keeps me in their lives
and they in mine, and that is truly where I want to
be.
With
that I leave you with this final thought. Every call,
every image, every sound has a real human being attached
to it. Welcome the connection we have formed with those
around us, and use the technology to manage it all,
rather than hating it. The options to disconnect, drop
out, and run away to a quiet place in Vermont sounds
good during the worst of days, but being tightly weaved
into the lives of those we love is far better,
Just
another rambling thought, Larry
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Passwords
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If you've
ever lost your wallet, you know the sense of vulnerability
that comes with it. Someone might be walking around
with your identification, pretending to be you. If someone
stole your passwords, they could do the same thing online.
A hacker could be opening new credit card accounts,
applying for mortgages, or chatting online disguised
as you-and you wouldn't know it until it was too late.
Read on to learn how you can help protect your identity
online by creating stronger passwords.
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You probably
already know not to create passwords using any combination
of consecutive numbers or letters such as "12345678",
"lmnopqrs", or adjacent letters on your keyboard
such as "qwerty." And you've probably heard
that using your login name, your spouse's name, or your
birthday as your password are also big no-nos. But did
you know that you should never use a word that can be
found in the dictionary, in any language? That's right.
Hackers use sophisticated tools that can rapidly guess
passwords based on words in the dictionary in different
languages, even common words spelled backwards.
If you use
a common word as your password, you might think you're
protected if you replace letters of that word with numbers
or symbols that look like the letters such as M1cr0$0ft
or P@ssw0rd. Unfortunately, hackers know these tricks
too.
Are
you using weak passwords?
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Should
sensitive data be stored on laptops?
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- Every
month seems to bring another episode of sensitive personal
information escaping into the wild because a corporate or
government laptop computer is lost or stolen. A common response
is a lot of hand-wringing over how the data should have been
encrypted.
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But some key questions usually go
unanswered. Why is so much private data allowed to be
on laptops to begin with? What do people do all day
that compels them to tote around records on, say, 26
million Americans, the staggering number seen in the
recent Veterans Affairs case?
"It's pure laziness. There's actually no excuse
for it," said Avivah Litan, a security analyst
for Gartner Inc. "There's no good business reason
for it."
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Litan
advocates a few simple steps: Organizations should keep sensitive
information only on secure, centralized servers. Workers can
access the data from PCs in the office or over private Internet
connections, but can't store the records on their own machines
to fiddle with them offline.
Read More
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Balancing Life
