Building A Stronger And More Solid Workforce

There are several factors that can encourage a person to apply for a job at a specific company and stay on to become a loyal, long-term employee. Primarily, the opportunity to work within one's academic field is a major factor in deciding on which employers to send applications to; in such an employment, the candidate will be able to put the skills and knowledge he gained from his academic life and training to good use. For others, however, getting the job they studied for may not be as urgent a need as landing one that pays significantly better. Still others may choose to apply at an office where employees and the management alike demonstrate a solid commitment to various social causes. No matter where a candidate sends his resume, one can assume that he chose a specific organisation because he believes he can gain positive benefits from the employment.
When employees choose to leave a company, it is equally important for the employer to know the reasons that led to this event. Resignations can indicate that there is a source of dissatisfaction or discomfort within the company's processes that may be affecting the employees' performances or their view of the work environment. By hiring experienced human resource experts to gather and interpret staff turnover data, a company can discover its strong points that motivate people to join their team as well as its faults that convince them to seek employment elsewhere.
Exit interviews are some of the most important processes that can give companies a clearer picture of why employees are choosing to leave their positions. In these interviews, a person is encouraged to identify the reasons they wish to leave-this could pertain to lack of communication among teams, faulty leadership from the management, disorganised workflows, strained relationships with colleagues, unsafe or unsanitary facilities, and others. Often, people undergoing exit interviews will be asked questions such as whether any steps were taken to address these issues and why resignation was the solution chosen by the employee. With this information, a company can discover its undesirable practices and weak spots and address them accordingly to prevent future resignations and improve the harmony within the workplace.
Human resource experts will also be able to help companies discover their strong points that encourage people to join their teams and engage them to stay as employees for the long haul. These experts can find out the main reasons why tenured employees choose to stay; these could refer to respectable leaders, outstanding benefits, creative and constructive team dynamics, and comfortable and productivity-stimulating office surroundings. Companies can identify their strongest areas and further develop these to strengthen employee satisfaction and productivity even more.
With successful employee retention practices, an organization will find itself with loyal, inspired, and happy employees that contribute to the success of the entire business entity. These workers will also become highly likely to invite friends and acquaintances to discover for themselves how the company can be a great place to work, thus bringing in even more qualified and dedicated employees. Retention experts with years of experience in human resource management can help strengthen a company's existing workforce, implement effective recruitment strategies, and enjoy success thanks to their valuable employees.

IT Support Solutions That Ensure Continued Productivity In Your Workplace

Small businesses, however small they may be described, still have a lot on their plate to keep the venture running smoothly. While they may not have large departments of employees or overseas sites working round the clock on specific operations, they would still have a number of processes to look after, and this is often made possible by the creation of a highly efficient and rewarding office information technology (IT) system.

What small businesses may not have, however, is a dedicated IT department to maintain an eye over their systems throughout the day. If a technical crisis were to emerge on a particularly crucial period, the small company would have no immediate way of getting the IT system back up and running, and every minute that passes with major operations stalled would have potentially devastating loss on the company's ability to generate profits. Important tasks will be delayed and many opportunities for new or recurring business may be lost. One solution to prevent this from ever happening is to hire an excellent IT support team to handle the company's various IT needs.

Local and reliable IT support services would have the know-how and the skills to resolve simple to complicated IT issues in the quickest time possible. Most of these service providers offer a remote support program to help business with their technical problems right away. If there are cases wherein the issue would need a closer inspection or more hands-on solutions, locally based support teams would have no trouble heading out to the client's offices to restore the systems as quickly as possible.

Most IT support systems are also well-versed in a variety of other offerings. They would also be qualified to perform a network installation service to carry out specific IT projects of different scales-from simple servers to more complex multi-site requirements. Client companies can hire IT experts to help from the initial planning stage through to the completion of the project if they wish.

A data recovery service would also be a popular and extremely helpful offering by an expert IT team. Several factors can wreak havoc on a small company's technical systems: a computer virus might attack its servers, an employee may have mistakenly deleted a number of important files, or accidents involving fire, water, electricity, and even natural calamities might severely damage a company's hard drive. Skilled IT experts can employ recovery procedures and install preventive applications to help companies avoid similar disasters with data loss in the future.

5 Tips to Encourage Your Customers

Product review & rating has become a popular feature that most of the successful e-commerce merchants have applied on their product details page. Main advantage of this feature is: it assures the visitors and customers that this product is not just another banal e-commerce product. People are actually talking about it (both positive and negative) and their thinking is listed here!

People always leave for your competitors when your product details page can't satisfy them by assuring them. Your product details page is the most important part of the site as this is the place when your customers decide whether to add the product to the cart or to abandon it. Hence, every effort should be taken to assure the customers that the products you are offering are indeed offers good bargain and value for price.

One of the strongest features in your product details page is the option to let the customers express their opinion and experience about the product. A simple one line comment added by a happy customer can assure lots of other visiting customers about purchasing the product.

Following are 5 tips for making your product details page more efficient by encouraging customers and visitors to write reviews for your products:

Tips 1 - Product Details page Design:

Your product details page design should get special emphasize hence people always love to visit the products details pages that are visually attractive and neatly presented. The product details page should arrange the product images, description, prices and attribute selection options etc. very neatly and in a way so that customers can find information easily. If your product details page design and arrangement is vivid and attractive, people would love to write something about it. Adding Image zooming, image video and multiple images illustrates the product better and thus gives customers a good insight about the product. If a visitor finds a eye-catchy product details page, it's more likely that s/he would like to add some words there.

Tips 2 - Don't make the process complicated:

Keep the Review & Rating feature simple. A complicated process would simply forbid visitors and customers from adding the reviews. If you want the rating feature to be present along with the review option, offer a visual 5 star rating which can be rated using the mouse click. Offer the negative rating options that would give a bold impression to the visitors that they are free to rate it the way they feel. For the Review make the email fields optional as people often don't want their emails to be visible publicly. Offer an option whether to show or hide the email addresses from the published reviews. One issue you should be particularly careful about is the CAPTCHA. Easy CAPTCHA can easily be broken by the spammers and hard CAPTCHA irritates the real reviewers. Choose one which is difficult to break by the Spamming softwares yet easy for the human users to read.

Tips 3 - Moderate the Reviews and rating:

Your e-commerce platform should help you administering the review and rating casted by the visitors or customers. You should be able to publish/un-publish the reviews,(even manipulate if you want), control the visibility, control the number of reviews per page, reply back to a reviewer and other conventional review & rating moderation features. If you value what your customers are saying about your products, you should regularly moderate the reviews. Visitors feel frustrated they find that their reviews are never getting published in your website. Send them thank you emails for the reviews and visiting your website and as reply to the review, write something that would not only impress the reviewers but also other visitors.

Tips 4 - Keep the 'Negative Reviews' as well:

If your product details page is full of reviews with flattering and praising words & all 5 stars, that would possibly make other visitors doubtful about authenticity of those reviews. If customers are criticizing the products, it's your best chance to defend the reason and let others know it. Take the chance to confront the negative reviews with satisfying answers and place them among the other reviews.

Tips 5 - Reviewing Competition:

What about announcing a little gift, free coupon or discount for the top rated reviewers? Yes, that would definitely encourage visitors and customers explore your products and write something about them. A $5 coupon code, 5% discount or free gift wrapping would inspire lot more visitors and customers to write some lines for your products.

Only 1% of SMEs Use Social Media

According to a recent survey completed by TalkTalk Business, only 1% of SMEs in the UK utilise social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as new business tools.
Can this be true? Apparently so! I recently read an article in The Drum which highlighted this and, I have to say, I was more than a little surprised. Social Media platforms are most suited to SMEs in that they are free to use, and help to engage directly with their existing, as well as potential, customers. In 2011, Facebook surpassed even Google in terms of internet usage... yet most companies will invest in a website but not give social media a second thought, meaning they are only covering themselves in half of the online market space.
From reading many articles about the emergence of social media specifically as a business tool, I have gleaned that this is mainly down to a classic case of 'fear of the unknown'. "What does it do?", "how do we use it?" and "Where do we start?" are all questions we encounter on an almost daily basis. The answer to this is to have a clear cut strategy in place for your social media usage. As with most forms of marketing, you need to have a defined plan. This can be difficult when you don't fully understand what you're working with yet, so don't be afraid to ask for a little advice or input - sometimes the best ideas for content etc come from customers themselves.
It is really important that you don't overtly try to 'sell' your products and services to your online audience. We see far too many cases of repeated posts of "buy our new this" and "we sell that cheaper than such a body"... this is not the way to go. Obviously the ultimate aim is to generate more or repeated business from your social media usage, but this should be done in a more engaging way. Try instead to be informative about the products/services and become a bit of a guru of information within your specified area. Chat with people, ask questions and answer their questions. The idea is to engage with your audience in a way which will leave an impression, making you the first company they think of when they think of a certain product/service.
Another thing to consider is that social media is a long term investment. It won't generate massive results over night, and it is not a 'quick fix', but don't give up on it! Over time, it is an excellent way of attracting/ gaining presence and retaining business and it WILL work if you do it properly and persevere with it.
Perhaps the most important aspect of your strategy, along with what to post, is where to post to. There are so many social media platforms in use, so it is important to gauge which ones will be best suited to the audience you are trying to target. For example, trying to endorse a video game is likely to have a lot of success on Facebook, but yield very little on LinkedIn. Gauging which outlets will have the greatest impact is all about analising where your customers are more likely to frequent.
I will end with a comment from Paul Lawton, MD of TalkTalk Business -
"Social media can prove invaluable as a new business tool and so it's worrying to see that so few SMEs are embracing it. Its business benefits range from being able to engage and understand the needs of customers and prospects through to gaining insights into target markets and perceptions of your organisation or brand".