Office Communication: Tips to Stay Connected

Want your office to run as smoothly as possible? The first step involves improving communication.

There's nothing more stressful than lack of communication in an office setting. When co-workers don't work together as a team, problems and misunderstandings - big and small - can arise, causing unnecessary dilemmas and even rifts.

The following tips will help managers improve office communication:

* Hold regular meetings. Whether they're held weekly or daily, meetings are a great way to find out what's going on around the office and learn about what assignments or events are to come. This also is a good time to talk about what goals need to be set for the office.

* Utilize technology. Though e-mailing, interoffice calling and paging are effective ways of keeping in touch with co-workers, new technology is taking communication to a new level.

One such technology is the Immediate Response Information System, also called IRIS. Developed by TechRadium Inc., IRIS is an innovative alert system that sends routine, priority and emergency messages to building occupants, building managers and, if necessary, emergency responders. These voice and text alerts are sent through a variety of frequently used electronic devices: home and cell phones, e-mail accounts, pagers, PDAs and fax machines. IRIS is an affordable communication system because it requires no hardware, software or system installation for setup.

* Use your listening skills. Pay attention so that you do not miss out on important information that you may need to know or discuss with a co-worker or client in the future.

* Spread the word. When you have sensitive or important matters to discuss, don't hide behind e-mails because the message can be misconstrued. To make sure you get your point across, meet with each party that's involved or contact them by phone.

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Better Online Communication Makes Business Sense

Many companies are now doing the majority or even all their business online and foregoing the “Brick and Mortar” storefront. It is easy to see why that trend has happened. For one thing, the cost of setting up such a business is relatively inexpensive and easy. There is no need to pay for the overhead of a physical building. Also, the cost of maintaining a Web site is minimal. Moreover, the Internet provides a convenient and efficient way of marketing products. As more and more people are spending time on the Internet, the market of online customers continues to grow.

But when businesses shift from face-to-face customers to anonymous online customers, there is a loss of personal connection and trust. All the online spamming and scamming hasn’t helped the matter at all. That has eroded the trust in E-commerce and the credibility of many companies.  How are you gaining and maintaining customer trust? What are you doing as an online vendor to communicate to your customers?

In an online world, business just doesn’t stop after hours and on weekends. What are you doing to answer your customer’s questions? Here are a few things that you can do to improve communication with your customers:

1. Offer a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page and online product support information. This is an excellent way of answering basic questions that may otherwise flood your support email. For example, our voice-changing product, MorphVOX, has a FAQ on the common issues that customers may come across. We also have provided detailed online documentation on topics that users may want to explore more. This takes care of roughly 95% of the questions people may have.

2. Add a support email link on your Web site for issues that can’t be resolved by the Web support. At Screaming Bee, we try to answer our customer questions within one business day. More often, we’ll answer questions within an hour of receiving the email. I believe that we have gained many loyal customers because of our aggressive efforts to meet needs in a timely manner.

3. Provide a message board or forum for customers to voice their opinions, add comments, and interact with each other. Remember that people are social creatures and like to be heard. This also helps to build up a community of users that are empowered and have a say in the products and services that you provide.

4. Write a personal email to each customer. Have you followed up on your customers after they have made a purchase of your products or services? This is essential, not only from the perspective of getting feedback on how to improve your offerings, but more importantly, maintaining the trusting, long-term relationship with your customer.  Send them an email within 3-4 weeks of the first purchase. In this way their experience with your products and services is fresh in their mind.  Remember, a customer who is ignored is a customer who is lost.

Spending time and effort on better communication with your customers will pay off. Your company will rise and fall not on the customers you gain, but on the customers that you don’t lose.  Loyal customers will be the ones that give you the best testimonials. They also provide you with the richest, organic, word-of-mouth marketing. Remember that every happy customer is a testament of your company’s success.

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5 Easy Ways to Increase Your Business Using a Toll-Free Number

Toll-free numbers allow customers to contact your business without them having to pay for their call.  Studies have shown that consumers are more likely to call a business with a toll-free number than those who only have a long-distance number, and 90% of Americans say that they use toll-free numbers.  By following these five easy steps, you can discover for yourself how a toll-number can help your business grow.

1. Expand your market.  Toll-free numbers allow you to use the same number for receiving local toll and state-to-state calls.  This gives you the opportunity to market your business nationwide.  Even if you don't provide service in certain areas, toll-free numbers have the flexibility to block calls from those areas.

2. Advertise your number.  Toll-free numbers lend an air of legitimacy and professionalism to your business.  By using a toll-free number, your business may appear larger and more established to the consumer which will make him/her trust you more.

3. Initiate a direct response mechanism for impulse buyers.  By allowing your customers an avenue to immediately react to your company's efforts calling for their action, this prompts significant increases in phone orders.  It has been found that these buyers generally order more merchandise and higher ticket items nearly every time they call.

4. Qualify your buyers.  Toll-free numbers enable your business to use time more efficiently and effectively.  With a toll-free number, you know that someone who has called your business is already interested in what you have to offer.  You spend less time trying to find interested prospects and let the number find them for you.

5. Analyze your call detail.  Toll-free numbers allow you to track calls and access all of a call's details such as the number, time, date and duration of every call.  This information cannot be blocked and is an excellent tool for generating leads which can lead to more sales.

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Amazing Communications

As history has progressed and technology has continued to advance, life has become full of more and more good things. Without a doubt, one of the best things that our society has gained from the advances of technology is communications.

Consider for a few moments all of the amazing forms of communications that have made your life easier and more full. First and foremost in many peoples minds is the telephone. Even if you like to write letters once in a while, can you honestly imagine if letter writing and telegrams were the only way to communicate with people? Think of the countless ways that having phones have improved worldwide communications. My telephone allows me not only to call my next-door neighbor but the communications a telephone allows also enables me to call a friend who has moved to Africa in just a few moments time.

If having the telephone doesn't impress you enough, think about the way the internet has improved communications and many other aspects of your life. The internet has literally connected people from every corner of the globe by the simple click of a button or two. Our communications with people have become easier, more frequent, and faster. You can send a message to a business parter in Tokyo and receive a reply within mere seconds. Amazing.

The improvements in communications have opened up a world of possibiility to people in the area of travel. Places that were once impossible to reach are now not only possible to reach but also convenient and quick. Each time I sit in an airport I find myself amazing by the incredible communications system that keeps air traffic in control around the world. I can definitely see how an air traffic controller is the most stressful job in the world, but there is no way the job would even be possible without the intricate communications system we have to use.

With a less advanced system of communications, life would be different for individuals around the world, but life would also be different for countries and international relations. Imagine trying to keep the peace with an overseas country by the exchange of letters? Decades would pass before any amount of substantial communication could take place. Chances are high that we would enjoy far fewer privileges to visit or move to other countries without a great communications system like what our world has in place.

Before you pick up the telephone or sit down to check your email, take a moment to be grateful for the afffects of advanced communications in your world and in your life.

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WISPs and Bandwidth Management

Most Internet service providers have a bandwidth limit.  Even if they advertise unlimited Internet, there is usually some level of transfer that will red flag in their system and cause them to take action.  This is usually in the form of calling you to up-sell their service or, in extreme situations, cutting off your service.

Most people will never run into this problem.  ISPs can advertise unlimited data because the soft cap (this is the bandwidth limit) is so ridiculously high that a user would have to try pretty hard to hit it.  Most users can go about their business without ever coming even remotely close to the limit.

So why impose limits?  From a consumer standpoint, many feel cheated by the fact that they are not really getting unlimited service when they’re paying for ¨unlimited service.¨  But this is more to protect an ISP or WISPs customer base than anything else, after all - they don’t make more money by cutting off people’s service.

How does a bandwidth cap improve customer experience? The simple answer is that ISPs can ensure that they do not oversell their bandwidth.

So what’s the big deal with bandwidth getting oversold?  As an ISP or WISP operator, you want to ensure that you are providing good service for your customers.  Unfortunately your pipe is only so big, so it has to be shared between your customers.  Giving one customer access to the whole pipe means that he could use all the bandwidth available and leave all the other customers with slow or no service.

So you give each customer a fraction of the pipe.  Bandwidth is sold by calculating the average load per customer so you can sell to the most customers while still providing good service.  If all those customers get on and try to download a bunch of data at the same exact time, you will run into problems because the bandwidth is sold to accommodate average usage.

So if one customer is maxing out his portion of the pipe most of the time by downloading huge amounts of data, it is more likely that other customers are going to run into problems.  The line needs to be shared, and one person hogging up the line is going to cause unhappy customers and possibly people dropping their service.  It is better to cut off the ¨trouble maker¨ and keep your customers who aren’t causing problems.

With properly allocated bandwidth resources, you should never be running into problems.  Everyone will have great service and will be happy.

Sometimes an ISP or WISP will want to sell service plans by bandwidth.  This is different from unlimited plans because instead of a soft cap you have a hard cap.  This may be set anywhere from a couple gigabytes a month an up, depending on several factors like the size of the service provider’s pipe.  When a customer reaches their limit - say 2GB - their service is simply cut off, or they are redirected to a page telling them they need to upgrade their plan.  This is the best solution for Wireless ISPs who don’t necessarily have the capacity to give unlimited transfer to everyone on their network.

Sometime these hard-cap plans are better for consumers because they know exactly what to expect.  Having an unlimited plan cut off from over usage can come as a surprise to a customer, but if you have a 2GB plan and you’re cut off after 2GB, you won’t be surprised at all.

These plans are also better for environments where your average user is a light to medium Internet user.  Someone who checks their email every day, browses around for a few hours a week, and doesn’t download a lot of media will probably be fine with a plan that gives them a couple of gigabytes.

Bandwidth limits help to ensure high quality service on a shared line.  If you are an extremely heavy user, you should expect to pay more for your service - after all - you’re using more than most people on the network.

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What is Active X?

Active X is a software technology that was released by Microsoft; basically this technology allows content or programmed capabilities to be sent from the web to a Microsoft Window's computer.

Active X in its earlier form was OLE and COM technologies. OLE stands for Object Linking and Embedding and COM stands for Component Object Model. Active X was primarily developed so that end users on MS Windows computers can interact with content and link files such as MS Word Documents or Excel spreadsheet documents from a computer to the web with ease.

In this case, an internet browser visiting a website with Active X would be able to view a Word or Excel document directly in their web browser. Unfortunately Active X was created with poor security features and lacked even basic security controls. For this reason many computer security experts discouraged its use.
OLE (Object Linking and Embedding)

OLE allows an object from one application; let's say a MS Excel table to be embedded into another application- a MS Word Document. In this specific situation, the MS Excel table becomes an object, it is then cut or copied and pasted directly into the MS Word document and saved. OLE allows a user or group of users to work on separate parts of a master file and then quickly compound it or put it all together.

Microsoft renamed OLE, calling it Active X in 1996. In 2005, Microsoft has dropped its support for Active X primarily due to a loss in a patent lawsuit. This means that in newer editions of IE web browser, end users will no longer be able to interact with Active X without first activating it. For instance, many media files such as Flash, QuickTime, etc must first be activated. Before, you can usually roll over a media item with your mouse or open a page in your web browser to start active X, now you must first directly interact with the media object and for instance click the item to start a file or to interact with its properties.

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What is RAM

Anyone who works as their own tech geek on their computer system may be highly concerned about what is ram? It is a very important piece of a computer system. It is Random Access Memory which is the location where the application programs, the operating system, and data presently in use are stored. This way the computer's processor has the ability to reach them momentarily when needed. RAM is head and shoulders above the other various types of storage inside a computer system. It's even faster than floppy disk, hard disk, or CD-ROM. The information stored in RAM is only accessible for the length of time that a computer is begin run. Information previously stored in RAM disappears when a computer is shut down. When the computer is turned back on, information from hard disk is retrieved to bring RAM back to the forefront again. RAM is much like main memory that is accessible by programs.

How Does it Work?
RAM operates much like a human being's short-term memory. Much like the human brain RAM is able to draw upon the computer's long term memory for information. This is often necessary when short term memory becomes full. Most computers come equipped with at least 256 million RAM bytes plus the hard disk which has the capability of holding 40 billion bytes. Data is placed on a magnetized area that resembles a record. Computer printers also hold bytes of RAM as well. Each byte of RAM has the ability to be ascertained separately without the other bytes being accessed.

Types of RAM
RAM comes in dual forms. DRAM which is Dynamic Random Access Memory and SRAM which is Static Random Access Memory. DRAM is the most typical of the two types. DRAM requires refreshing at a rate reaching in the thousands each second. DRAM's times for accessing information are 60 nanoseconds. SRAM is more costly, but does operate at a much quicker pace than DRAM. The interlocking of a capacitor and a transistor produces a memory cell. This is one bit of data. Also, SRAM allows access at times as quick as 10 nanoseconds.

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