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How to Improve the Standards of Your Customer Service

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Let’s face it: consumers are the lifeblood of any business. There’s no getting around this fact. Therefore, they must always remain the priority. After all, satisfied customers can help a brand build credibility and generate awareness. Those who have had a positive experience on a brand are likely to become advocates and recommend it to family and friends. 

customer service

Consumers today don’t merely look for quality products and services. For many, a considerable portion of their buying decision can be determined by how they view a company. So, if you’re looking to draw in more prospects, you’ll need to ensure that you deliver an exceptional customer experience. With that said, here are a few tips on improving the standards of your customer service.

Encourage customer feedback

To provide your customers with a high level of service, you must first understand their pain points and needs. You can’t meet their expectations if you don’t know what they are, after all. And to achieve this, you must encourage them to give their feedback, whether it’s through email, social media messages, surveys, or complaint systems. 

In doing so, you’ll find which areas of your business need some attention and improvement. As a result, it’ll give you the opportunity to correct any mistakes and show both existing and potential customers alike that you value their input.

Outsource to a call center

Today, many businesses opt to hire a call center’s services to handle their customer support because it enables them to focus on their core priorities and keep costs low. And if you expect a relatively high volume of calls or messages from your customers, so should you. With their expertise and knowledge, you’ll be able to maintain a high level of service performance without the need to organize and strengthen your own team.

But keep in mind that you’ll need to choose a contact center carefully to ensure that you get the most out of the service. Do your homework and research on their credibility. Additionally, you’ll need to make sure that they use the tools and equipment like dialer software so they can offer your customers excellent support. 

Utilize a CRM platform

Many businesses often struggle when it comes to establishing efficient coordination amongst their teams, leading to the dissatisfaction of their customers. To address this concern, you can streamline your workflows through the use of CRM or customer relationship management systems. These platforms function primarily to ensure that everyone stays concordant and at the same wavelength.

Beyond providing useful customer insight and improving their engagement, it also allows the service and sales teams to work more harmoniously, minimizing any confusion in turn. Since they’re generally accessible on most devices, they’re easy to utilize, regardless of where you are.

Bottom line

Success in any entrepreneurial venture goes beyond the quality of products or services — although these are still essential. You must also offer a good level of customer service. So make sure that you follow the above-mentioned tips. They will help you keep your customers happy.

What to Do When Your Business is Stuck in a Rut

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Any business has its ups and downs, but sometimes the lows seem to last longer than the highs. Getting stuck in a rut can feel like a drag as it hurts motivation and efficiency to all stakeholders, from leaders down to team members.

Business is Stuck

It can be especially damaging when it happens to a business as it means you are stagnant and not growing. There are internal and external factors that can bring your business down. Whatever they are, as an entrepreneur, you should know that your company can get back on track. It can be a slow process, but when done right, it will definitely ramp your business up and can propel it higher. 

Here are ways you can revitalize your business when you feel like you are stuck in a rut.

Talk to Your Customers

A business’ performance and standing are always determined by its customers. If you want to get moving, reach out to your customers and grow your base. Make it a point to listen to them and make them feel involved and appreciated. Create a focus group to hear honest opinions of your business and opinions on the direction it should go.

Establish an online presence. Actively use social media to interact with customers and get their feedback. Scroll through some comments, tweets, chats and messages about your brand to hear what people are saying and what they like or dislike about your business. From here, you can determine which aspects of your business need improvement and strategize how you should operate and deliver products or services better.

Boost Your Marketing

Among the most effective ways to rebuild and strengthen your customer base is to revamp your marketing efforts. Modernize it and try to keep up with current marketing trends and strategies. Research on what’s on-trend and try to adapt and stay relevant. Use data and analytics to measure the impact your campaigns are making and see which ones are effective and which are not working.

Sometimes, you need to talk to people differently to draw in more attention. Consider creating a fun social media campaign to engage new clients or an email campaign to draw traffic to your website. 

Marketing says a lot about your business, so find a creative way to stand out from the crowd and be unique. 

Rebrand

An overhaul of your brand is not that bad of a thing. In fact, there are specific circumstances that make it just right to rebrand. This applies when your company identity becomes stale as it does not stand out in the market due to the number of competitors. Outdated designs and campaigns can also push your business down further, so it is ideal for updating things and breathing new life into your company.  

Rebranding is a great wait to rejuvenate your business, as it gives people something to discover. Use this opportunity to improve your company identity. Strengthen your mission and values and make sure that you can convey this to customers. 

There are also numerous alternative ways to rebrand, both big and small. You can use new colors for your brand, update your logo, launch some new or updated product and generate a new social media campaign. If you have the budget, try to renovate your store. 

Update Your Website and Mobile Apps

Your website and mobile app say a lot about who you are as a business. It can draw people in with user-friendly, appealing features, or it can turn people away. As more and more businesses adopt digitalization and demand tech-powered services, do not get left out. Compete with a fast-performing website and a functional mobile app to keep your services available and accessible. 

If you do not have an online presence yet, consider hiring a developer or having a DevOps team to help rejuvenate your website or mobile app. If you want a complete overhaul of all platforms, consider hiring Angular developers, as they are experts in making sure your website, web app, and mobile app will work altogether.

Update Processes

Perhaps you are in a rut because your work processes are outdated and not efficient or automated. You are missing out on many things if you are still using paper or a spreadsheet. Check your workflows and processes and see if they efficiently contribute to growing your business. Make your processes simple for your team with as much automation as possible. 

According to the University of Oxford, happy employees are 13 percent more productive. This percentage can be what you need to pull your business out of the rut it is in. When your team no longer has to waste as much time following insufficient processes, they can be happier and can focus on other things like innovative practices or developing new creative ideas for your brand. 

Inspire Your Team

It is not only your customers that can get bored or need something new to look forward to. Your team, who are the propellers of your business, can also get tired, unmotivated and uninspired at times. Make sure you consider their needs as well, and they are being heard and appreciated. 

Offer learning opportunities or lecture series to inspire your team or allow them to engage in interesting or exciting activities. This may include team-building programs, innovation contests or even a simple incentivized way of asking for their suggestions or opinions. 

You could also offer opportunities to work from home or flexible office hours so your team can travel and work from anywhere. Consider creating a system that incentives your team to try new things. Google encourages their team members to spend 20 percent of their time working on something they think will benefit Google. 

It’s Time for Change

Changes and uncertainties can definitely be daunting. But in the business world, it is important to embrace change and innovation to make room for growth. If you feel stuck in a rut, it only means it’s time to get moving and shake things up a bit. Find aspects to improve and get your business back on track. Every step up and away from that rut you are in, no matter how small, is progress.

How to leverage flipped classroom strategies

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The ‘flip learning’ method is not just a fancy term. It is a very useful and effective way of learning. If you are a teacher, student, or parent of a child in school, you’ve probably heard of flipping learning. This article is focused upon understanding what is flipped learning and how you can get started with flipping your classroom.

How to leverage flipped classroom strategies

What is flipped learning?

Flipped learning has been used by educators and learners for decades. The idea behind flipped learning is that students learn by watching short videos at home before they come to class. The teacher then spends time going more in-depth into the material, answering questions, and giving more examples. In this way, the focus of group learning gets shifted towards individual learning on the specialized topic.

Benefits of flipped learning

The flipped classroom, where you watch videos outside of class time, can have several advantages. These include: 

  • There are fewer disruptions from the distraction of a group class.
  • Learners can learn at their own pace, without being held back by classmates who do not grasp certain concepts as quickly or thoroughly. Repeatedly watching segments explain difficult concepts in greater detail until they understand them.
  • Learners will not necessarily know what their teacher plans to cover in class and thus will be more prepared because of your pre-class reading and viewing of related material.
  • Flipped learning allows students to use their brains in different ways while they are learning new information. By seeing how concepts relate to each other through videos and reading materials outside of class, they are better able to understand how they fit into the big picture when they hear lectures and see demonstrations in person.
  • The flipped classroom allows teachers to cover more material in class and save time for interactive activities
  • Trying to understand something by reading it is not enough for some students. To learn and understand something, we need to see the practical application. The flip method helps to do this easily without having to take extra time out of the teacher’s busy schedule.

How to get started with flipped learning

The first step to flipping your classroom is to define your learning outcomes and make sure they are clear to everyone involved with your class. Learning outcomes should be specific and measurable so that students can know when they have achieved them. Be sure to include both short-term and long-term goals. For example:

For the short term, students may need to write a paragraph explaining how friction causes objects to slow down or stop when they move over an object like a rug or grass. A long-term goal for this same concept might be for students to take their understanding of friction and use it to design a toy car that travels across different surfaces at different speeds.

What do flipped classrooms require?

Flipping your classroom isn’t just about recording a lecture and calling it a day. It requires:

  • A well-designed learning module consisting of instructional video or podcast. 
  • A set of clear instructions and guidelines for all.
  • Students engaging with the material using discussion boards, blogs, or forums.
  • An assignment that requires students to apply their knowledge in new and creative ways.

LMS (Learning Management System ) like Adobe Connect is an online platform that makes it convenient for teachers to post their videos or audios online and make it accessible to students. Students watch lectures at home or anywhere else where they have Internet access and then complete exercises or homework after watching the lectures. That makes it easy to integrate with flip learning.

Conclusion

Flip learning is the future of education. As a new teaching method, it pays more attention to the students’ needs, makes use of multimedia equipment and computer software and LMS can be used as a tool for the flipped classroom.

4 Steps to Optimize Operational Processes in Your Business

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Business Process Optimization (BPO) is an ongoing process aiming to improve efficiency and effectiveness, something that no business can ever have too much of.

Optimize Operational Processes

Each and every process can be optimized to identify and remove possible bottlenecks. BPO should be designed to eliminate activities that don’t add value to the customer or to the business itself, to reduce cost, promote efficient use of resources and increase employee productivity. That is why BPO should become part of a regular procedure in every business.

1. Analyzing and Documenting Current Processes 

The first step is to formally register current processes, so that you can deeply understand how your business is running on a day-to-day basis. This step is crucial to create benchmarks for improvement, as well as to identify potential weak spots.

Identify and document each aspect of every ongoing process in the business: how long it takes, what resources it requires, departments and employees involved, etc. The process is time and energy consuming but crucial in order to point out areas for improvement. It also creates useful blueprints that can later be used for defining standard operating procedures or employee training.

2. Identifying Areas for Improvement and Defining Success

Once the data is collected, it is time to do in-depth analysis and point out processes that will benefit the most from being optimized. By prioritizing you avoid the risk of becoming overwhelmed with the sheer volume of processes and work to be done around them. The criteria for prioritization can be set around how frequently the process is being used, the highest cost or highest ROI, the processes that are most time consuming, etc.

This is also a good opportunity to define how improvement will be measured, i.e. which units for tracking and measurement will be used (time spent performing a task, cost, profitability, etc.). Once these key performance indicators are set, you will need to define current values for the prioritized tasks and set goals for each one.

3. Create a Phased Implementation Plan

After comparing the current state of the prioritized processes with the desired outcome, you will be able to map out a plan of action on how to achieve the desired improvements. Gaps between the current and the future state should be highlighted to define action steps on how to overcome them. This process also includes defining expectations for team members that are part of the process in question.

One way to achieve this successfully is the DevOps model that joins together operations and development teams. The concept allows businesses to evolve much faster than when relying on traditional management by creating synchronisation across the entire product (or service) development lifecycle. 

By removing traditional barriers between the development and operations departments, teams start sharing responsibilities and improving communication, which further results in increased productivity and improved performance.

4. Tracking and Analyzing Improvements

The final step of BPO is going back to the beginning. Every process that is being optimized should also be continuously tracked and regularly analyzed against its own benchmarks. That is the recipe for ongoing optimization of every aspect of an organization.

Investing Time and Resources into Process Optimization

It is true that BPO occupies time, resources and employees’ attention, making it a costly process for an organization. But its benefits are extensive, stretching over increased performance, improved efficiency, reduced costs and better overall functioning of a team. By implementing the steps above you can greatly increase the ROI of your processes. Plus, once the optimization systems are set up, it takes less and less time and effort to keep them running.

What Is The Coax Extender, Should You Get It & How?

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The Internet has undeniably shaped the way we live today and we have all become dependent on it. You might think that this is a bad thing and it can be quite problematic sometimes and for some people, but the truth is that the Internet is generally good for us and that we should be happy to have it. If you don’t quite understand the reasons why the Internet is good for us, you should get some additional info on it and thus finally understand just how useful it is.

Coax Extender

We are not here today, however, to talk about the importance of the Internet. I am quite certain that you understand that already, so there is no need for us to dwell on talking about that. Instead, we are going to talk about something a bit more specific that is still Internet related. Let me ask you a simple question and thus give you a quick hint on what it is that we are going to be addressing today. Are you happy with the range of your Internet at your home or, say, in a commercial property of yours?

I am going to take a wild guess and say that your answer to this question is now. After all, if you were happy with those 100 meters limitations, then you probably wouldn’t even be here, researching coax extenders and basically looking for ways to broaden the range and get rid of the limitations. Well, those coax extenders are precisely what we are going to talk about today, as they can serve as the perfect means of broadening the range and getting rid of the limitations.

There is no doubt in my mind that you have already heard about these products before and that you have at least an idea about what they are. Yet, having an idea but not really knowing enough about a particular topic usually isn’t enough, especially for those people who are thinking about taking certain actions and actually using the products that they “have an idea” about. What does this precisely mean, however?

Well, to put things simply, it just means that you will have to get better acquainted with the Ethernet coax Extender and thus understand precisely what it is, how it works, whether you should get it, and also how to actually get it. So, that is our topic for the day. We are going to talk about these specific extenders and hopefully lead you towards understanding specifically what they are and whether you should be using them.

Coax Extender

What Is The Coax Extender?

Let us start with the most basic question of them all here. It is perfectly logical for us to start with the question of what coax extender are, because there is no point in talking about how to get them if you don’t even know what they are used for and whether they would be helpful for you. So, what exactly are Ethernet coax extenders?

In simplest words possible, these products are designed to help you span your Ethernet network over rather long distances while not experiencing any connectivity issues and while maintaining the perfect speed of connection. Does this sound like something that you would very much like? I am sure that it does, since you’re probably not quite happy with the range that you have right now.

The best part is that you can run your connection over existing coaxial cables with next to no modification, which means that this can be the perfect solution for a broad range of applications. These products help you overcome infrastructure obstacles or distances even when new wiring or Wi-Fi connections are practically impossible. With these coax extenders, you can even connect those isolated user stations within the same or a separate building.

Coax Extender

Should You Get It?

You now most likely understand precisely what a coax extender is, which means that you are now interested in figuring out whether you should actually get it for your space or not. Well, this is a question that only you can answer, but here is a hint for you. If you are not exactly happy with the range of your connection, you should definitely think about extending it and, as it turns out, these specific products can help you do just that. So, this really shouldn’t be a question at all.

Of course, you might start thinking that there could be other solutions for your problem and you definitely wouldn’t be wrong. What makes the Ethernet coax extenders stand out among those other solutions, though, is the fact that they are rather cost-effective, which makes them the perfect solution for practically everyone. Thus, if you are looking for a favorable and an affordable solution for your troubles, then you should definitely consider getting this specific product.

Here are some more solutions you could consider: https://www.cablinginstall.com/cable/article/16472236/3-ways-to-break-the-100meter-copper-barrier-for-ethernet-lan-extension 

How To Get It?

If you have decided to get this product, then you will only have to think about how to actually get it. Well, it all begins with finding and picking out the right products and you will be able to do that only if you take your time to research the manufacturers that have created them. There are certainly a lot of manufacturers out there and it is your task to figure out which one could be best for you. Doing the research may take some time, but it will definitely be worth it.

You might not be sure how to do the research, so let me give you a few hints on that. The good thing is that you can do all the research online, which is definitely rather convenient for everyone. All you have to do is figure out how experienced certain manufacturers are and how reputable they are. You can figure that out by reading some reviews online that other customers might have written. Lastly, you can check the prices and do some comparisons before making your final purchase.

ConvertX to DVD Makes Video Converting an Easy Task

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I have spent this holiday watching Christmas movies with my family. A very good software is needed to convert your videos on your computer to DVD format, and directly burn to DVD disc.

I did a small research on several AVI to DVD burning softwares, and found that ConvertXtoDVD was the most suitable for me. It is a multifunctional software that converts any video format to .vob format (which is a DVD format) with high quality output and no errors. Moreover, it accepts subtitles to be embedded with the movie in case you want to watch your movie with subtitles. You can also add an auto-run menu for your DVD which starts as soon as your run your DVD. ConvertXtoDVD supports you with many features, where you can customize your videos with a capacity to choose NTSC or PAL; this gives a professional output.

ConvertXtoDVD, which is famous for AVI to DVD burner software. supports many video formats (AVI, MPEG, MOV, WMV, MKV, OGM, etc) with no need for external codecs. The converting, burning process is relatively fast. And you can burn the converted video directly to DVD or just save your project and burn later.

convertxtodvd_screenshot-main

So, in case you have movies, or videos on your hard drive, I suggest that you free your computer and burn your favorite movies to DVD discs. You can also backup important videos on your computer to DVDs.

In summary, everything is done in just a few clicks, you drag and drop movies to the software interface, modify any settings in case you want to change the default one such as choosing the chapters, auto run menu, burning speed, etc. Then, click the convert button, and finally you add an empty DVD disc, or save your project for later burning. Using this software I have converted around five movies and watched with friends, family during this holiday. In case you want to watch your videos on standard home DVD player, start using ConvertXtoDVD burner software.

Video Tutorial

Make Mobile APPS for Free with Conduit Mobile!

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Conduit Mobile allows web developers and content providers to create their own Apps for free which supports all the major mobile platforms including iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia and Samsung. Conduit is ideal for bloggers, web designers and for all the geeks who are intended to develop a great-looking mobile app without any coding skills. Once your app is ready, you can share it with Conduit Network which has over 230 million users. It is also possible to update and maintain your app as per your requirements.

conduit mobile

How to make your first app in Conduit Mobile?

Creating an app in Conduit Mobile is as simple as ABC, in fact you need not write a single line of code, the only work is to just customize your app to make it more attractive. To make your first app-

  1. Enter the URL of your website, press “Get Started” button beside.
  2. Conduit Mobile automatically scan your site for content and arranges them in the dashboard
  3. In the dashboard you will be allowed to customize your app, you can add the custom content here and change the look of your app with various themes and color schemes. It is also possible to change the navigation look in this panel. You can see the live preview of your app in the simulator located beside dashboard.
  4. Finally publish your App to all major mobile app marketplaces, Conduit Mobile Marketplace helps you to promote your app.

Why Conduit Mobile?

  1. Major benefit of Conduit Mobile is that you don’t create mobile apps in different platforms one by one such as Android, iPhone or Windows rather you create an app and then deploy it to various mobile platforms at once. This saves your precious time and energy as well.
  2. You can get analytical reports on your app’s performance which helps you for further tweaking.
  3. You can seamlessly promote your app with Conduit Mobile’s powerful social networking tools.
  4. You can monetize your app with integrated mobile advertising tools.

Make your first mobile app in Conduit Mobile at http://mobile.conduit.com